this post was submitted on 28 Mar 2025
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Its also a really great base project to build on top of. The routing system is a plug in library which can be easily replaced. That means if someone wants to build something that collects and utilizes live data for traffic/construction avoidance they can totally do that. Adding new map layers is also a big one that they made sure is going to be easy to do.
Has anyone actually created a traffic plugin yet? This is one of the main reasons I use Magic Earth still. I regularly bounce between that, Organic, and OsmAnd. They all have slightly different features.
The organic team doesnt wanna deal with collecting user data so they wont do it. Getting live location data from millions of people basically requires using and feeding into google services and thats a no go.
Ofcourse someone else could do it, but thats just a waste of time, if google can cut you off from their API at any point.
Even if you start your own project, no matter what you do, there will always have to be some company that collects all the data. That company no matter how cool and FOSS will eventually be forced to cooperate with law enforcement and then you are back to what we have now with google.
Location data is just too sensitive and impossible to anonymize properly.
But isn't there a possibility to fetch data from official websites (like https://stau.info/ in Germany) around your place? It won't be as good as google, but better than nothing.
As long as it only pulls data and doesnt share any its not as bad. But each of these local services most likely use different APIs and formats, so implementing it wont be so easy. For just large highways its realistic imo, but if you want data for inside cities it becomes impossible.
If the database of traffic info become so large that it's impossible to download it all at once it means you have to selectively download data for your location/route which makes it possible to infer user location again.