Google Australia adds traffic feature to Google Maps

Search giant Google Australia is continuing to add features to its Google Maps tool, launching a tool that allows users to monitor traffic flows in major cities and uses crowd-sourcing data on which the service relies.

Information on Google Maps displays the current traffic status of many motorways, major and minor arterial routes in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, and smaller areas like Wollongong, the Central Coast, Geelong, the Sunshine Coast and the Gold Coast.

When the “traffic” function is turned on, roads are marked with a coloured line indicating whether traffic flow is fast (a green line), medium (yellow), heavy (red) or stop/start (red and black).

The same traffic information is also available on Google Maps for mobile, but there is a nice crowd-sourcing twist for mobile users.

If a user has Google Maps for mobile running on their phone and has GPS enabled on the device, and they choose to enable the “My Location” feature, then the phone will send data back to Google about how fast the device is moving.

“When we combine that anonymous speed data with that of other mobile devices travelling on the road ways, across thousands of phones moving across a city at any one time, we can get an even better picture of live traffic conditions, and we share it with everyone for free in the Google Maps traffic layer,” Google product manager Andrew Foster said in a blog post.

“The more people that participate the better – because traffic results get even more accurate for everybody.”

The search giant has been quick to allay privacy concerns about the location information. It says it will only use anonymous speed and location information to calculate traffic conditions, and only do so when the user has opted in by enabling the “My Location” feature.

“Scale provides further privacy protection: when a lot of people are reporting data from the same area, we combine their data together to make it hard to tell one phone from another,” Foster argues.

As an added protection, Google says it will find the start and end points of any trip and delete that data.

Over in the US, Google has also announced the creation of DataLiberation.org, a site run by Google new Data Liberation Front team. The idea behind the site is that Google wants to make it easier for users to transfer personal information and data to a new service.

Google says it has already “liberated” (enabled easy data transfer) from over half its products Gmail and Blogger, and will liberate Google Docs and Google Sites in the coming months.