You car doesn't call the cops and rat you out for speeding; the data only gets pulled after a serious collision with airbags deployed. At that point it's a legitimate criminal investigation and not simply a matter of privacy.

Works well unless you're in Canada. Then any city in Alberta is "Calgary, is that right?" and any city in Ontario is "Toronto, is that right?"

Now that google has got all the free data they need, they can shut down the service and encourage people to buy more smartphones. It's really a shame, but not unexpected from any company; I was hoping for better from google.

Figures, just after I convinced my father to stop using the telco 411 (and paying the $$$) and to use GOOG-411.

Effectively in Canada there are two national providers.

Bell and Telus use the same frequencies, in fact they have sharing agreements across the country.
Rogers / Fido is the other one, same company, different brands.

The new carrier, Wind Mobile, is only operating in Calgary, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa, and Vancouver. They are filling a role like Fido did before Rogers bought them. They run on the same frequency as T-Mobile's 3G network in the USA.

All these carriers use Sim cards.. most phones will run on Bell/Telus/Rogers (850 range), but some will run on all four (Nokia 5230 for example).

For a second I thought this would be about some cruel and unusual punishment in a third-world country.

I'm on Bell Mobility in Canada (until July 2009 when I can change without penalty) and not only do we have the listed voice mail annoyances, we also pay $6 each a month for caller id and voicemail. Also there is no trick that a caller can use to skip the greeting. If you record your own, it appends "At the tone, leave your message" anyways.

Did I mention we have to pay about $20 more a month on average (even after currency conversion)?