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from the Not-that-NSA,-the-other-one. dept.
The US National Sheriffs' Association wants Google to block its crowd-sourced traffic app Waze from being able to report the position of police officers, saying the information is putting officer's lives at risk.
"The police community needs to coordinate an effort to have the owner, Google, act like the responsible corporate citizen they have always been and remove this feature from the application even before any litigation or statutory action," AP reports Sheriff Mike Brown, the chairman of the NSA's technology committee, told the association's winter conference in Washington.
Waze, founded in 2008 and purchased 18 months ago by Google for $1.1bn, has about 50 million users who anonymously share their locations to help gauge road traffic flows. The app also allows police reports and road closures to be added to maps and shared with other users.
Brown called the app a "police stalker," and said being able to identify where officers were located could put them at personal risk. Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, said his members had concerns as well.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/26/nsa_gunning_for_google_wants_copspotting_taken_off_waze_app/
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday January 27 2015, @01:55PM
No comments on the app?
I figured it was a dotcom bubble kind of thing? I tried using it a couple years back around the buyout time, and not too many people use it here, so at a ratio of like 10 people per 4 million person metro area, 50 million users would imply a worldwide population of 20 trillion or so, sounds like a puppeteer world or trantor before the fall. I suppose 50 M might have logged in at some point in the previous ... forever, and the worse the local infrastructure, the more value the users obtain off reports of failed infrastructure (traffic jams, etc).
Also I bet road layout has a major influence... I don't live in a grid area, so if there's a traffic jam between A and B then there's really nothing I can do about it. I know in areas like Chicago there is a radial grid of interstates so you could drive around, other than everything being in perpetual backup conditions so there's no gain in trying anyway.
Its a difficult app to find a real world use case.
I tried using it as a driver and it was too clumsy to safely use while driving... makes texting while driving look safe, especially around accidents or whatever, morons slamming on the brakes. Its really slow and painful and agonizing to click off an accident on the side of the road or whatever. Also I'm usually doing something else with my phone while driving (mostly podcasts and audiobooks, sometimes music) so that adds to the difficulty. If there was a home screen widget I could click to report stuff... maybe they've added that?
I found the gamification aspects weird. "Everybody gets a trophy" is one of those things that is a minor +1 for maybe 25% of the population and an icky repellent -100 for maybe 10% of the population, such that its going to be a net loss, or another way to look at it is its narrowcasting down to a sub population. The exact numbers don't matter but maybe it would have 150M users if they ripped out gamification. Gamification is kinda like the horrible animated active DVD root menus that people used to have to suffer thru before streaming wiped out DVDs. Believe it or not, 99% of the population hated those damn things but we were all stuck with them because 1% of the population actually liked them.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 27 2015, @02:22PM
(Score: 1) by skater on Tuesday January 27 2015, @04:37PM
I use it frequently and it works beautifully - either in and around the city or out on the open road, on weekdays and on holidays. This is mostly in the eastern USA, so there's good population density, which obviously is a factor. It's been far better than any other source of traffic information for me; when we run into an unusual slow spot on our way to work, my wife will first check Waze to see what's going on, and the information is always there.
I agree that indicating a new hazard can be a bit distracting, so I rarely do it while driving.
Also, gamification works for many, many people. Every app of this type (crowd-sourced data) has it. People feel rewarded for contributing...contribute more, get more rewards.