TomTom giving customer driving data to cops

[Roland Perry]

In article <BANLkTimAOJ345kr2Bte7=c5QcwMDHDTHQQ at mail.gmail.com>, Tony 
Naggs <tony.naggs at googlemail.com> writes
>
>Hi Peter, all
>
>Check out Tom Tom's Live Traffic product description - apparently this
>uses feedback from 80 million mobile phones and 1.6 million Tom-tom
>devices with their own mobile phone subsystem. Average speed trends on
>segments of road indicate whether the road is clear or congested.
>
>Presumably the Dutch police were buying an additional service, that
>told them the actual average speeds. It seems like a good idea for the
>police to have detailed information so that they can issue warnings
>when a motorway is snarled up, or a traffic to/from a sporting event is
>causing disruption.
>
>The Register article says the police identified roads with chronic
>speeding problems from the data, and targeted those roads with radar
>speed checks.

And wouldn't this same information be available in the UK from all those 
Trafficmaster cameras?

I'm prepared to believe that the TomTom data doesn't overtly identify 
individual cars, they could be sending the police tracking data based on 
a token for each car, although you could still build up a picture like 
those iPhone maps we saw last week, and know where the car was parked at 
night.
-- 
Roland Perry