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Comment by dr_faustus | Hacker News Reader

It might be surprising to some people in Silicon Valley but there are folks who find it a bit disconcerting that Google knows every place they drive to, when they do it and how long they stay. I personally am glad that there is still some competition in the maps market and since HERE is a European company, you can expect them to be much more privacy conscious than Google (or Bing Maps, ftm).

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What's even more bothersome is that there is absolutely no reason for any of this. GPS based navigation does not need a server connection to function at all, the one thing you might need a network for is periodic map updates.

google maps will (seems to?) consider current traffic when suggesting a route, which is a big plus for having a server connection.

Might be not enough to prefer online navigation to offline, but it is a reason.

Yes, I think that's a big part of why they bought Waze

I'm not quite sure that's accurate. Aside from updating the Almanac, a typical navigation system also updates traffic data.

Sending live navigation data to servers is useful to update traffic information in real time. Estimates of arrival time are much more accurate if you know how long it took to somebody who used the same route 10 minutes ago.

That should be 'opt-in'.

These are German car manufacturers,though.

1st, Germans really like their privacy, 2nd, We have inductive loops at EVERY single lane of every single intersection. Meaning, you can get live traffic data without needing to know where everyone is.

> We have inductive loops at EVERY single lane of every single intersection.

What? I'm German and I have never heard about this. I also can't find anything to support this.

I am aware of induction used for traffic light switching, but certainly not at every intersection, let alone in every lane.

Well, I’ve seen them at every intersection I’ve been to in Kiel, Berlin, etc.

At least in the bigger cities for traffic shaping they measure the traffic at every lane of every intersection.

I think the absolute ubiquitous tracking of cars is inevitable in the short to medium term future anyway. Self driving cars will almost certainly have permanent network connections and your cars location will be uploaded to some server somewhere for traffic management officially, but of course for policing too. I can't imagine a scenario where this doesn't happen.

You seem to make the assumption that everyone gets their map info from Google. I don't understand why. They only provide the maps with their value-added info (user annotations) and routing.

The vast majority of GPS systems source their map data just as Google does and then add their own value-added information.

Google only knows where I'm driving if I plan my trip with Google's tools. Otherwise, there's no connection between my GPS/maps and google.

How European a company is it? Some significant part of it is made out of Navteq, which was headquartered in Chicago.

Privacy by the way,

Is there an alternative to Bing and google translate?

What nefarious use of the data will be beneficial to Google?

Google can be hacked or forced by public authorities to enable or to do nefarious things. I know, godwin’s law, bla bla, but look what happened during the second world war to german companies. There are more examples.

I’m not okay with being tracked, and I don’t care whether the tracker swears to be or not to be evil. And no, this is not negotiable.

I'm especially not OK with being tracked when it has absolutely zero benefit for me, long or short term. UI is getting worse (for all these megacorps that harvest all the "automated feedback" they can) and I don't consume advertising and even if I did, the "targeted ads" are irrelevant pretty much all the time.

Tracking is the only way for Google to get traffic data; you could still not find that reason enough to get tracked, but it's not "zero benefit" for users.

I'm quite sure they, and other map providers who have live traffic info (including HERE), get the data primarily from infrastructure managers.

I don't know if anything changed recently, but I'm sure that at least until a couple years ago they got the traffic info from their own app.

Apart from NSA et.al., there is huge commercial value in movement profiles:

- Visiting a physician a lot? You future health insurance might wanna know.

- Spend a lot of time in the red light district? That must be worth a couple of bucks to your employer who wants to get rid of you.

You might think that this is far fetched and right now, it still is. But 20 years ago, most people would have considered it very implausible and offensive that their private conversations (emails) or library searches (web searches) are sold to advertisers. Well, lets see what (some) people find acceptable 20 years from now.

Google is a US company, bound by US constition & law. Which doesn't extend a right to privacy to non-USAians outside the USA.

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