Mobile-phone position data to fight traffic-snarls

Cory Doctorow 9:56 am Wed Jan 22, 2003

Finland is planning to use position-data from mobile phones to find traffic jams and warn drivers when they're approaching congestion. While this has some disturbing privacy implications, depending on implementation (can't see much wrong with having sensors that compute the volume of mobile phones in a region, without paying attention to which mobile phones they are), it sounds eerily like the P2P/GIS traffic-shaping scheme I talk about in my next novel, Eastern Standard Tribe.

The nation's transport ministry is running pilot projects to find out if signals sent from drivers' mobile phones to base stations can be used to time trips along popular routes.

The signals will help the transport ministry work out where traffic jams are building up and warn drivers of impending delays.

Using mobile phones could be a cheap way of gathering useful information because the phone network already covers the entire country.

Link

Discuss

(Thanks, Jim!)

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