![]() Whether you like it or not, “telephone companies have always known where your phone is,” Dobson says, because cell phone companies need to use location to appropriately charge customers for calls. So how does Google know what traffic is like on the roads, nearly all the time? From our smartphones, of course. But that theory kind of flew out the window when you watched Season 4 of Arrested Development and realized it’s actually the Michael Bluths of the world who are doing that job, with car-mounted cameras. If you’re like us, you assumed that Google Maps was using some iteration of the cameras it uses for Google Earth to map traffic. It’s like Google has its own traffic helicopters traversing the roads at all times–except that they don’t. If a road is colored green, it means it’s moving along, but a yellow road suggests some traffic and a red road means even more congestion. ![]() Eventually, it added the capability to show how intense traffic would slow a driver down, so users could see how long the same route would take “in heavy traffic.” This was based off of “historic data they could gather,” about what traffic was like on that particular route when it existed, says Mike Dobson, president of Telemapics, a company that tries to solve geographical problems.īut in March of last year, Google Maps became much more useful to drivers, because in addition to offering directions, they also started to offer real-time views of how congested the roads were. The earliest iterations of Google Maps had no traffic feature–it was simply focused on getting people from Point A to Point B. Luckily, we stand to gain from one of the manifestations of the information Google now collects, through mapping traffic. But the company is gaining still more data as it expanded from the browsers on our computers to launch Android phones, the most popular smartphone in the country. ![]() The information they catalogue about us helps them do their job–they can better target ads to us, and thus they make more money. If the eerily targeted ads that appear on the sides of a Gmail inbox are any indication, Google knows a lot about its customers. Here’s how Google is mining travel data to help perfect their maps application, and what else you might stand to gain from Google mapping traffic. But how exactly do they know? Is it creepy? Are we taking it for granted? Luckily, we now have smartphones-which, thanks to Google, might actually give drivers some clues as to what to expect on the road ahead. Along with an overcooked burger and some mosquito bites, traffic will inevitably factor into each of our weekends. We all love their traffic alerts, but how exactly does GoogleMaps know how clogged the highway is on your way out of town this weekend? As the Fourth of July weekend approaches, many of us will be hopping into our cars en masse in search of a long awaited break.
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