In the US, Google Maps is getting incident reports from the Waze community. — Google
Google has announced the gradual arrival of incident reports from the Waze community on Maps in the United States. These alerts can be very useful for finding out whether or not the police is nearby,
In the US, some Google Maps users can now take advantage of one of Waze’s flagship features: real-time reporting of road incidents such as accidents, road closures and police presence. Community incident reporting has long been one of Waze’s flagship features.
This participatory system for flagging incidents helps keep traffic flowing smoothly. The aim here is obviously to improve the daily lives of Google Maps users, by informing them of incidents on their route so that they can adapt their itinerary to avoid high-risk areas. In the future, other types of data could be shared between the two applications in the same way.
This new feature will be rolled out progressively in the United States, but in some countries, such as France, the law strictly regulates the dissemination of real-time information concerning the presence of police officers on the road.
Sharing such data in real time can undermine the effectiveness of police interventions. It is therefore unlikely that this new feature will be offered to French users in the near future, unless legislation is relaxed, which is unlikely.
Although Waze has always been a more avant-garde platform than Google Maps, it has a much smaller audience, counting around 150 million users compared to nearly two billion for its counterpart. – AFP Relaxnews
