Tracking Traffic Jams With Cell Phones 130
kaufmanmoore writes, "Companies and governments are looking to alternatives to expensive radars and road sensors to track traffic jams. Two Atlanta-based companies are aiming to use data from wireless carriers to mark how fast phones are moving and overlaying that with maps to calculate traffic conditions. One of the companies, AirStage, has already partnered with Sprint-Nextel and the Georgia DOT to cover Atlanta's notorious traffic. The plans raise obvious privacy concerns over the usage of the data of your cell phone's location and the accuracy of this data." From the article: "[The] systems rely on wireless companies allowing them to process the data from their towers that calculate the position of each phone about twice a second when it's being used and once every 30 seconds when it's not. [One company's technology] can track vehicles to within 330 feet without using Global Positioning System satellites. Its software is designed to weed out the difference between pedestrians and drivers, then crunch it into detailed color-coded maps that show average speeds along roadways."
Watchin ME or watching THERE? (Score:4, Interesting)
tempted to think there is no problem in making this information available.
However, the privacy concern may not be limited to the ability track a specific phone, which they would probably require court permission to do.
There are lots other uses, and abuses of such technology, such as finding where tonight's big party is located, which local watering hole is over-capacity, how much traffic the local liquour store (or street corner dealer) is getting.
Even if such uses were void of personal data, they provide data about the location,
whether that be a private home or a business.
Equally as likely would be the reverse. (Score:3, Interesting)
“Causing Traffic Jams With Cell Phones”
Once someone has an accident you can all report the incident and resulting congestion right away!
Re:Differentiate between cars and pedestrians (Score:2, Interesting)
Privacy issues are not as bad as people think; anyone with a GPS-tracked 911-enabled phone made in the last 3 years is being tracked while it's on. Anyone concerned with privacy should also consider that their conversations go through the network of the very provider that knows where they are; talk about Aunt Midge's cancer treatments can be heard just as easily. Whether third-party snooping can be done depends on encryption, and that doesn't count the person 10 feet away who heard the credit card number just used to place an order of pizza. People in general complain about privacy and fail to realize just how much technology encourages them to compromise it themselves.
I would encourage the responsible use of this tech to track traffic patterns in a non-personally-identifiable way. A unique ID assigned to a dot, with as little info as necessary to track movement; no link to an account, etc. The cell provider already has the info, so they can control its use between departments by translating one unique ID to another and severing the link between the two. I do this for HIPAA-safe medical claims; de-identify the patient and the rest is valid data that can never be traced back.