Project Turns GPS Phones Into Traffic Reporters 119
narramissic writes "Starting on Monday, researchers from Nokia and UC Berkeley will kick off the Mobile Millennium project. The researchers hope that thousands of volunteers will download a free Java program that figures out by their movement and location when they are driving, and then transmits that information to the project's servers, which then crunch it into a Bay Area traffic map. 'The whole concept here is that if everyone shares just a little bit of what they're seeing ... then everyone can benefit by seeing the conditions ahead of them,' said Quinn Jacobson, a research leader with Nokia in Palo Alto."
The privacy post (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm sure the data is anonymized, but how well? Will people be comfortable with having their phone track them? Anyone know? Didn't RTFA yet... ;)
Re:The privacy post (Score:5, Insightful)
If this became a big thing and my company maintained a toll road then I'd be looking for ways to create phantom "traffic jams" on alternative routes. This sounds like a trust based system.
Re:The privacy post (Score:5, Insightful)
That's no problem. The idea is that you benefit from the information which emerges from the aggregated data. Kind of like other community projects, for example CDDB or Wikipedia. You feed a small piece of information into the system and get the service of the whole system back.
The thing to watch out for is: Who owns the data? Are you really just jumpstarting a commercial enterprise which will later turn the free service into a product or serve your data back to you with ads, while you are forbidden to use the database for your own purposes?
Re:Yeah but Helicopter crashes are more entertaini (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Interesting, but only useful if widely adopted (Score:2, Insightful)
While recent research has suggested that a gas-based model might give better predictive results, you shouldn't need that kind of fine granularity to be accurate in the near-term.