Google makes traffic congestion maps available for Sri Lanka

Nov 19, 2015 (LBO) - Google Maps has activated traffic information for Sri Lanka with useful congestion data for Colombo and other locations, an IT observer said. The maps are available for any location where there is mobile data and slow-moving traffic, Malinthe Samarakoon, a developer for yamu. lk said. Available on Google maps for both mobiles and desktops, users have to click the menu option on the top left-hand corner of Google maps to select the traffic option. Roads are marked with red lines for slow traffic, and marked with orange and green lines for faster movement. According to Google, if Google Maps is used for mobile with GPS enabled on your phone, then Google Maps starts accumulating data on travellers necessary for traffic estimation. "When you choose to enable Google Maps with My Location, your phone sends anonymous bits of data back to Google describing how fast you're moving." "When we combine your speed with the speed of other phones on the road, across thousands of phones moving around a city at any given time, we can get a pretty good picture of live traffic conditions." Google combines this data and sends it back to Google Maps traffic layers. When Google Maps for mobile is turned on before starting one's car, the resulting traffic reports are better for everybody, according to Google. To address privacy and security concerns, when a lot of people report data from the same area, Google combines data together to make it hard to tell one phone from another. "We find the start and end points of every trip and permanently delete that data so that even Google ceases to have access to it," the blog said. "We take the privacy concerns related to user location data seriously, and have worked hard to protect the privacy of users who share this data. "