Mobile Phones As Traffic Detectors
from the so-simple dept
I remember reading about a similar plan to this one about a year ago in the US - and thinking that it sounded like something that the privacy watchdog folks wouldn't like. However, it's now being tested in the UK and Sweden. It's a system that uses the location and movement of mobile phones to determine traffic conditions. Since there's an element of location based info in any mobile phone that's turned on (which tower is it connected to), the aggregate set of info showing how quickly people are moving from tower to tower could indicate where there are taffic jams. They claim it's quite accurate, though, others say that without context (is there an accident? is a lane closed?) that info won't be that useful to most people.
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