Drivers in The Netherlands who noticed that speed traps were a little too perfectly placed lately weren’t just being paranoid; turns out local cops have had a wealth of TomTom driving data – including historical speed – at their disposal. Because TomTom sold it to them. Et tu, satnav?
TomTom has since apologised for the privacy breach, saying their original intent was to prevent traffic bottlenecks and and improve safety. Although if they were doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, wouldn’t they have just donated the info instead of concocting lucrative licensing deals?
The company also maintained that the data was anonymised, but in this case that’s not the point. What TomTom did was to turn its users’ own driving against them; pretty shady for a service whose only purpose is to get you from point A to point B. [AP]