(Waze)
Waze, 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 car dashboard screens. This gives Waze—and therefore Google—a lot more data about you, your habits, and your car. This kind of info collection might worry some users. But Erik Gordon, who studies entrepreneurship and strategy at the the Ross School of Business, believes the public is pretty comfortable with giving up their personal information in exchange for a deal. “Every time I thought, ‘This is where consumers are going to put their foot down to protect their privacy,’ they don’t put their foot down,” Gordon says. “They open their arms: ‘Let me give you more information if you give me a $0.50 coupon.’”
