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Turning off the data tap for Routesy

An interesting question about ownership and rights to data in public use has arisen, chronicled in Apple kills Routesy app, my iPhone gets less useful

Routesy is an iphone application using data provided by the municipal transit authority, through an agreement with a data provider. The details are in the article, if you care to read them.

I have to agree the company has a right to license predictive arrival times, since such information requires investment in research and development, formulating predictive algorithms and such information does not meet the requirement of being "obvious" and thus non-proprietary.

However, the ultimate solution would be an application that took GPS data from every iphone riding the metro at any given moment, if it can be identified as to which bus it is, then do the same kind of approximate arrival time calculations NextBus does, only through peer-to-peer networked computation. Let all the iphones on the bus line find their own position, communicate with each other, track the movement of buses, compare to published schedule and then present the approximate times to the riders. A distributed system of self-analysis. Since all iphones would be held in private hands, and the data shared between peers, who agree to participate by sharing data on their location, the data would be owned by no one. Each person would own their own location and decide whether or not to share it.
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