WAZE DIGS INTO YOUR CAR’S DASHBOARD

WAZE DIGS INTO YOUR CAR’S DASHBOARD

WAZE ON YOUR 5-inch smartphone screen is so last year. The hot new thing is Waze on the 8-inch screen in your dashboard.

The crowdsourced traffic and navigation app owned by Google is joining the SmartDeviceLink Consortium and working with automakers and developers on open source protocols for connecting smart phones to cars. That means that everything you do in Waze, you’ll soon do from the driver’s seat with a few taps and swipes on the infotainment screen.

Kinda cool, sure. Granted, Waze is working on integration with other infotainment systems like Android Auto, but this lets iPhone users play along (Apple CarPlay has thus far blocked non-Maps navigation apps).¹ The real story, however, is that this gives Waze—and therefore Google–a lot more data about you, your habits, and your car.

“This is completely new in this partnership, that we get to get equal data from the car,” says Jens Baron, who manages in-car applications for Waze. The app will access a trove of info typically confined to the automobile: the temperature outside, whether the windshield wipers or headlights are on, how much gas you’ve got, that sort of thing. Waze also says it will be able to, say, determine that several cars are braking suddenly up ahead and warn others that something gnarly just happened.

Read more : https://www-wired-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.wired.com/2017/02/waze-cars/amp/