often includes good old-fashioned
loops embedded in roadway – in order
to build the most complete, reliable
and up-to-date traffic picture possible.
In TMCs, floating car data is used
alongside data from loops for
validation. TomTom, who pioneered
traffic information 10 years ago using
data gathered from its in-car
navigation devices – and is now
partnering with the likes of Apple
and BMW for a richer floating-car
picture which includes over 600
million connected devices – observes
that loops and roadworks forward
planning information still form an
Privacy first
Above: Connected
vehicles now provide
the richest form of
probe data, and the
volume of it is also
now on the increase
The gathering of floating car data can raise privacy concerns among
the general public, so the industry must work hard to allay these fears
The collection of data from
personal smart devices must
be done in a completely
anonymized way, stripping out any
information about the user and
cutting beginnings and ends off
journeys so that identities can not
be established from unique
residential addresses.
“Google is very strict with data.
Google stands for privacy. If
anything is not correct they rectify
it right away,” says Brian Batist, of
Google partner Localyse.
Likewise at Here, there is a keen
awareness of the importance of
privacy. “Before the data gets to
us, locally within the device or the
vehicle there is an arrangement
between the provider collecting
it and the user to ensure
GDPR-compliance. By the time
it is sent to us this kind of
information is broken up into
multiple sessions, so we don’t
even know if it’s one person or
multiple people providing it. And
of course once it does get to us
we keep it very secure and private
in terms of who has access to it
on our side. We don’t offer an
extractive data tool to anybody
– it’s for our own internal use only.
At every step of the way from
when the user opts in all the way
to where we get something out
of the data it is well protected
and secure.”
2005 The year that Google
Maps was launched
important part of this verification
and pre-warning process.
“We get roadwork information
from different sources and validate it
with floating car data,” says Sander
Pluimers, program manager at
TomTom. “For example, if we still see
a lot of probe data going by, we keep
the route showing as open, because
apparently the roadworks are not
affecting it.”
“Often authorities say there are
roadworks on a certain day in a
particular spot,” adds Maarten De
Smedt, strategic account manager
of TomTom Maps. “With our
Probe Data |
032 Traffic Technology International July/August 2019
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