Tom Tom Narks on its Own Users

[SYNACK]

Passing someone a little quickly on your road trip, best not be using a Tom Tom as it will happily nark on you back to their servers and onward to the Police.

 

Probably only affects few devices and people along with Tom Tom's claim of annoniminity but it is still a nasty precident and points out a trend of corporations working with govenrments to effectivly get their citizens to pay for their own bugs.

 

It is interesting to me that the path towards Orwell's vision is being fueled by user 'buy-in'.

 

TomTom admits to sending your routes and speed information to the police | Crave | CNET UK

 

GPS Maker TomTom Submits Your Speed Data To Police - Slashdot

[jamesb]

So let me get this straight...TomTom have offered a service which they have, all along, admitted allows your data to be anonymised and placed on a server where it can then be provided to all other users of the service. This allows you to see the average speed of traffic in an area and similar.

 

People are then boohooing because the police have purchased one of these devices, or access to the commercial data (anonymised obviously, to do otherwise would be clearly illegal) and are using it in order to check which places people regularly speed in, in order to put devices which catch people speeding?

 

Sorry, did anyone not see this coming? It's a community-sourced service which shows average speed, so that its users can see (shockingly) average speed. Hardly Big Brother.

[SYNACK]

They unlike Apple made a press release to head off any law suites or extrenuous rubbish. Its more the concern that if the data exists in some form then a small programing error on their servers and the right legal paperwork would result in information leakage.

 

I jut reposted it as it did seem interesting and realivant due to the other location based news lately but I may have been in error. It is a lot more above board than the 'other' incident.

[Guest Guest]

People are then boohooing because the police have purchased one of these devices, or access to the commercial data (anonymised obviously, to do otherwise would be clearly illegal) and are using it in order to check which places people regularly speed in, in order to put devices which catch people speeding?

 

Surely not, the police place speed cameras based on the accident rate, not as a money making scheme

[TechMonkey]

Again the stories are all a bit sensational. It makes out that your Tom Tom will inform the police that YOU are speeding and then goes on to explain that actually they are just looking at the average speed of a road and then seeing most people are speeding there. An easier version than when they place those dual lines down to find out the average speed.

 

It also fails to mention that it is only the Dutch police that have done this.

[jamesb]

Surely not, the police place speed cameras based on the accident rate, not as a money making scheme

 

My attitude to speed cameras changed while living in a village where people would zip along the main street at upwards of 60 mph. With two schools in the area, and a park, it wasn't exactly safe. The parish council managed to get two speed cameras placed there and people either started slowing down to only a little above the speed limit, or taking the bypass which had been built years before.

 

If people are too moronic to actually drive at a safe and sensible speed, then cameras are as good a solution as any.

[Guest Guest]

My attitude to speed cameras changed while living in a village where people would zip along the main street at upwards of 60 mph. With two schools in the area, and a park, it wasn't exactly safe. The parish council managed to get two speed cameras placed there and people either started slowing down to only a little above the speed limit, or taking the bypass which had been built years before.

 

If people are too moronic to actually drive at a safe and sensible speed, then cameras are as good a solution as any.

 

Well that's fair enough. In my area afaik there isn't a single speed camera next to a school, park, etc. Almost every single one is on a dual carriageway, usually in an industrial estate.