TomTom admits to sending your routes and speed information to the police

[Rich B 5,000+ posts]

28 April 2011

It appears every gadget in your possession is tracking your location. First it was the iPhone, then Android phones and now it's your bleedin' sat-nav. TomTom, perhaps in a pre-emptive strike against its own user-tracking scandal, has admitted its sat-navs can track users and inform third parties about how fast they're going.

The sat-navs in TomTom's Live range all feature built-in 3G data cards, which feed location and route information back to a central server, which allows TomTom to create a map of congestion hotspots. It's now emerged that this data, however, along with a user's speed, is being made available to local governments and authorities.

TomTom CEO Harold Goddijn revealed the information on the company's website. "We are now aware that the police have used traffic information that you have helped to create to place speed cameras at dangerous locations where the average speed is higher than the legally allowed speed limit," he says.

Knowing the cops can see where you're driving and how fast you're going is eye-opening stuff, but TomTom says the data is anonymous and can never be traced back to an individual user or device. Ordinarily, we'd be reassured by this, but we recall Apple saying something similar before the location-tracking excrement hit the phone-carrying fan.

The good news here, for the paranoid drivers among us, is it's possible to opt out of the data-collection feature on TomTom's Live sat-navs. This rather defeats the object though -- if everyone with a TomTom Live sat-nav opted out, there'd be no Live data to help users avoid traffic blackspots and you'll have wasted your money by splashing out on a high-end GPS system.

Crave is now taking bets on what device will create the next tracking storm. Will our refrigerators start monitoring how many pies we've eaten? Will our door locks start telling our mums that we're staying out til the wee hours? Will our computers tell our boss we've spent all day

instead of doing any... hang on a minute... dammit!


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

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[Spc4Mafia 10+ year member]

HAHA thats why I have a Garmin GPS

 

[T.I.K. 10+ year member]

Fucking cops...

 

[-01limited- 10+ year member]

Fucking cops...

Just wait till they make everyone get those new licenses they're thinking about with the gps chips in them.

 

[RAM_Designs 5,000+ posts]

I have a Magellan. //content.invisioncic.com/y282845/emoticons/fyi.gif.9f1f679348da7204ce960cfc74bca8e0.gif

 

[dragnix 5,000+ posts]

HAHA thats why I have a Garmin GPS

This is why I use mapquest

 

[Spc4Mafia 10+ year member]

Just wait till they make everyone get those new licenses they're thinking about with the gps chips in them.

nothing a quick 12v wont solve

 

[sleazebagger 10+ year member]

Im not surprised. The Mit people have been having a hay day using social networks and mainstream media to create a system to figure out everything you like/dislike and what the general consensus on everthing is. Thats worth big money to goverment/investors and so on. Same with your gps data.

If you owened a co. like tomtom and realized the potential profits for selling any and all data to whoever has the need you would do the same and justify it as public saftey and ignore the big picture

The powers that be will never stop trying to gain more control and power

 

[bannock 10+ year member]

Whats with everything being able to track us? Soon they will know when we poop.....

 

[bubbagumper6 5,000+ posts]

Like the cell phone companies haven't been doing this for years...

 

[Louisiana_CRX 5,000+ posts]

ping