GPS Maker TomTom Submits Your Speed Data To Police 422
An anonymous reader writes "The GPS systems in TomTom's Live range all feature built-in 3G data cards, which feed location and route information back to a central server. According to CNET, this data, along with users' speed information, is being made available to local governments and the police."
From the article: "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."
Why, oh why? (Score:3, Informative)
Dear TomTom,
Why would you go and do a stupid thing like this? I loved your products, but I will purchase them no more.
For those who won't RTFA; (Score:5, Informative)
The story is that the data was used by Dutch police to determine where to set up speed traps. The data was NOT used to go after any TomTom users for speeding.
It's still a somewhat dastardly tactic, but not quite what people on here are seeing it to be.
Re:Apple apologist (Score:1, Informative)
Re:For those who won't RTFA; (Score:5, Informative)
What actually happened is they sell the aggregated data to whoever is interested, one company distilled out the stretches of road where most speeding happened and sold it to the police.
Then the police used this to select places for speed traps.
Re:Don't just comment here! (Score:4, Informative)