San Francisco — Google’s Google Maps team has been quite occupied this summer, enriching its platform and beefing up location-based services such as Google Latitude, and now Google Maps is adding traffic data for side streets this week, in addition to the data it already offers up for major highways. The company now delivers traffic conditions on arterial roads in selected cities, but is still figuring out on bringing this to cover all U.S. highways and arterials when data is available.
Major “arterial” roads, such as state highways or large avenues in cities, will now boast their own color-coded traffic information in Google Maps, offering drivers the option of selecting an alternate route based on current traffic conditions.
Once you are through with your Google Maps search, zoom in on your city of choice and click the Traffic button. Software Engineer Jordan Weitz of the Google Traffic Team wrote:
As you zoom in closer to an area of interest, we will color the arterial roads, in addition to the highways, to show current traffic conditions. Just as with the highways, the colors correspond to the speed of traffic (relative to the speed limit of the road): green is free sailing, yellow is medium congestion, red is heavy congestion, and red/black is stop-and-go traffic.
So how is Google capturing its traffic reports to side streets? The track-able information is based on the commutes of people using phones with GPS, (with the notable exclusion of the iPhone, which does not support the feature, according to Google) you are automatically sending speed data back to Google wherever you go.
The activation is done by the “My Location” button in Google Maps, which automatically signs you up for the traffic crowdsourcing program when that button is pressed. In addition, Palm Pre and MyTouch 3G users are automatically enrolled in the traffic crowdsourcing program.
The program also lets you check the traffic history for different times — 8 a.m., noon or 5 p.m. — for any day of the week. Greg Sterling of Search Engine Land mapped traffic routes into midtown Manhattan.
Traffic information since long has been available on major highways for years on Google Maps, however, that information has been accumulated from road sensors and private car fleets and is also available to dozens of third-party traffic providers. The number of people using GPS-enabled smartphones with Google Maps installed has dramatically increased since 2007, and many of them may not be aware that by using the My Location feature, they are also participating in a traffic-related survey.
However, Google in an attempt to make the service beneficial for everyone, is taking great pains to address the security and privacy concerns of the feature in the blog post announcing the new feature, as undoubtedly that many would not be entirely enthusiastic about the idea. Google Maps Product Manager Dave Barth talks about privacy concerns:
“We understand that many people would be concerned about telling the world how fast their car was moving if they also had to tell the world where they were going, so we built privacy protections in from the start. We only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when you have chosen to enable location services on your phone.”
We take the privacy concerns related to user location data seriously, and have worked hard to protect the privacy of users who share this data — but we still understand that not everybody will want to participate. If you would like to stop your phone from sending anonymous location data back to Google, you can find opt-out instructions here.
Google also said it would wipe-out all the data it collects about the starting point and ending point of your journey as a natural course of the program: after all, it has to differentiate between someone stuck in traffic and someone parked outside the office.