[soinus]

I usually try to stay away, but I'll bite this time. I have no affiliation with Google, don't own their stock nor ever have, but these kind of responses bug me.

Working in data science I keep thinking about how I would solve a particular problem. Regarding real-time traffic: how would you solve something like this? Clearly one has to have a lot of anonymized data one can trust. Now the question is how to get these data. Google is building it's business on providing a useful service, like gmaps, for free and on using the data from the users of this service in aggregate to sell useful information to businesses that require these data for whatever they are working on, like the company in the article. Google is very transparent about how they use your data when you use their service and they seem to try to do their best to anonymize these data, e.g. you hardly ever get the access to even anonymous data outside of Google, but rather to the information computed from these data. So I see no objective reason for being so angry. What am I missing here? In the end, if you ever want a service like "ETA at destination" someone will need to acquire the data anyway, right?