Google Maps for mobile expands traffic coverage

Google announced it will extend its Maps for mobile traffic coverage to include all U.S. highways and arterials as part of an ambitious crowdsourcing effort to help drivers more efficiently reach their destination and influence legislative road planning decisions. According to Google, mobile users who choose to enable Google Maps with My Location send anonymous bits of data relaying updates on how fast they're moving--Google combines that information with the speed of other phones on the road, collecting information from thousands of devices in the vicinity to create a portrait of live traffic conditions. That information is continuously combined and transmitted back to users in the Google Maps traffic layers.

Google Maps is free and works with most mobile phones, with crowdsourcing features already pre-installed on devices including the T-Mobile myTouch 3G and the Palm Pre. Google adds that the iPhone Maps application does not support traffic crowdsourcing.

"We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start," writes Google Maps product manager Dave Barth on the Official Google Mobile Blog. "We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when you have chosen to enable location services on your phone. We use our scale to provide further privacy protection: When a lot of people are reporting data from the same area, we combine their data together to make it hard to tell one phone from another. Even though the vehicle carrying a phone is anonymous, we don't want anybody to be able to find out where that anonymous vehicle came from or where it went--so we find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it."

For more on Google Maps for mobile:
- read this Official Google Mobile Blog entry

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