The prize for lack of foresight just has to go to Harold Goddijn when commenting on the embarrassing revelations that his company, Tom Tom had been selling aggregated traffic data to the government who had in turn been letting the police have it for the purposes of setting speed traps:
“We never foresaw this kind of use and many of our clients are not happy about it,” he wrote, and promised licensing agreements would “prevent this type of use in the future.”
Too late. The genie is out of the bottle. As for unforeseeable outcomes; hardly. I’d have thought it eminently foreseeable. The state in all its forms and all of its agencies is not your friend. If it can find a way to extort money from the public, it will. The beast is neve sated, it always comes back for more and it is always looking for useful idiots. Step forward, Mr Goddijn – and in the process, you have damaged the reputation of your business.
I don’t use Tom Tom stanavs – my preference is for Garmin. Now, I wonder what they’ve been up to?
Some of us point-blank won’t go near ShatNavs.
They are incredibly dangerous.
1] Their information is notoriously unreliable
2] The number of times I’ve had to avoid some cretinous idiot suddenly “obeying” his (or her – usually his) computerised instructions right in front of me gives me the willies.
if I rear-end these morons in mt L-R it’s going to be my fault, but they are trundling along, and suddenly slow-down/ &/or brake &/or veer of, with NO WARNING AT ALL, so that, even if you were keeping a rasonable distance, suddenly you aren’t any morte.
In the best-mapped country on the planet, there is no need or excuse for these dangerous toys.
Anyway, I have a full set of the OS 1:50 000 scale, so there!
road pricing ‘ideas’ by the EU almost without exception include exposing us all to this problem.