So many times some kid has come up to me and said they wanted to learn to make video games. The trouble is that there's this giant gulf between the multimillion dollar games they play, and what they can actually do with newbie knowledge. When I was a teenager, (80's) I could see a game I loved like say... Ultima or Zork... and understand the steps leading up to me making that game. A little harder to find that maker's connection with Halo, Bioshock, Borderlands, etc. So maybe Minecraft can be a good bridge between the effort of programming and the rewards that are possible. A kid or some coming-up coder might get their feet wet writing some scripting for a game they love. So I'm all for it. Sounds great.
This is actually an Associated Press article by Maria Sudekum. See this link. Indiatimes.com didn't give credit to Maria or AP, which may mean they just snatched and reposted the content. I like to see the original author credited and let her reputation be affected (good or bad) by the quality of her work.
I work on in-vehicle systems and the servers that talk to them. There are plenty of existing, deployed services that combine external information with the location of your vehicle (e.g. concierge, route planning with points of interest, vehicle locator, charge station finder for EVs, geo-fencing, insurance scoring, and many more). For all of these, your location data must be sent to a server. And any in-vehicle system that provides at least some services that need vehicle location, will make a habit of sending the vehicle location along whether the owner is using those services or not, provided some kind of account activation has occured. Generally, the automotive manufacturers consider vehicle location data great for providing attractive services to their customers.
I've noticed restraint from auto OEMs on taking the data and using it for things other than the services offered to the users. And unlike webbish companies like Facebook, Google, or Twitter, the auto OEMs are focused on selling vehicles, not data. But that can all change if you fall asleep.
The networked collision detection stuff is interesting, but doesn't change the nature of the problem. The data is already being collected for boring old services from three years back.
The article (not the original paper) is averaging together all of the people that said "Naw, I wouldn't pay anything extra" along with all the people that said one, two, or five dollars, etc. So of course it's going to be some sad little number, leading to a headline that sounds like people are selling their souls.
A more useful question, "of those willing to pay for privacy, how much would they pay?" Read the original paper (not the cheap little article) and you see things like "A non-negligible proportion of the experiment’s participants (13–83%), however, chose to pay a ‘premium’ for privacy. " The paper is actually supporting the idea that some people are willing to pay enough that it would fit into the business model of different content providers.
I also think that a bunch of us hate the idea of paying for privacy, not because we don't value it very much, but because it is offensive to think we would need to pay for it. So again the article headline gives a false notion of everyone selling out for 65 cents, when the stats are unlikely distinguishing between apathetics and holy rollers that would both decline to pay for privacy.
I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.