Dutch Police Used TomTom's GPS Data To Target Speeders
By Eyder Peralta April 29, 2011
Over the past week, U.S. consumers have been talking about their smart phones keeping tabs on their location. In the Netherlands, another kind of GPS scandal is brewing: The government bought aggregate global positioning system data from the automotive navigation company TomTom and then used it to install speed cameras in places where drivers are most likely to speed.
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And how does this become any sort of "scandal" whatsoever?
TomTom users selected the option 'help TomTom improve their products' in the software. Which somehow included 'sell road-use data to third parties'. Directly or via another party (I saw conflicting reports on this) this ended up with the police who was interested in where people are likely to break the speed limits. No personal data was exchanged, just aggregates.
With a large number of people who think police speed traps are the root of all evil and the police should really do something about traffic safety such as ticketing people who drive the posted maximum speed on the innermost lane (and lots of variations on this theme), a scandal was expected.
Too bad for the media the scandal didn't happen. TomTom just told everyone they were guilty and didn't expect this particular use of the data and would put a stop to this, and by the way it is easy to load the locations of known speed traps into a TomTom device anyway and get notified.
Koos
Per Koos van den Hout:
That sounds good, but if/when the people who get a cut of the fines start shortening the yellow light times it may not help much.
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