The initial focus was on simply getting people from point A to point B in the shortest time with respect to distance travelled. Now they also offer real-time traffic information – green for it’s moving along, yellow suggests some traffic and red means congestion. Sometimes, the shortest route in terms of distance becomes the longest in terms of traffic. And Google keeps us informed how?

The most common perceptions

• Google Maps uses some iteration of the cameras it uses for Google Earth to map traffic.
• Maybe Google has its own traffic helicopters traversing the roads at all times. It’s Google, surely they can afford such luxury.

The answer, you hold in your hands. The Android smartphone. You can deny it all you want, but telephone companies have always known where you phone is.

Google owns a telephone company, it’s called Android, you can make the connection!

Google realized that as more and more people continued to switch to smartphones, they had a miniature army of traffic monitors that they could make use of. So the traffic flow that you see on your map is a highly accurate real-time display of the number of Android phones that are currently taking the same route.

Google uses its own algorithms to exclude anomalies, like a delivery truck will stop much more frequently than the average driver. We assume there must be a threshold for how much data they have before they’re willing to label a road green, yellow, or red, rather than gray (which means there isn’t enough data), but they’re not releasing that number just yet.

In response to the bombardment of privacy concerns, Google explains that people can opt in or out of sharing their travel data with Google under their phones’ settings. The company notes that they do try to protect the information–Google itself doesn’t even know what data is coming from which car, and they cut off the first few minutes and last few minutes of each trip in order to further disguise them.

You want GPS, you want traffic updates, is your privacy too big a price?

P.S: not eerie enough? The ads on your Gmail homepage are eerily related in some way to the content of your mailbox and your search history!