Traffic cameras don't give anywhere near the detail that crowd sourcing from mobile phones do, and you're just trading off one form of tracking which actually c

Traffic cameras don't give anywhere near the detail that crowd sourcing from mobile phones do, and you're just trading off one form of tracking which actually can be secured via DP, with another -- government CCTV cameras -- which CAN identify you via license plate recognition, and indeed, often DO. (https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-alpr https://www.eff.org/pages/automated-license-plate-readers-al...) Moreover, there are public safety reasons to use crowdsourcing. To give one very important example, early-warning earthquake detection for example, where seconds of warning are crucial. Millions of people are walking around with mobile seismometers, which in aggregate, could detect with high degree of accuracy, an earthquake as soon as it starts, and notify people within 1-5 seconds. It can only filter out false positives by sampling a vast number of motion sensors over a large area, and such a notification system can only work if it is virtually free of false positives (https://myshake.berkeley.edu/ https://myshake.berkeley.edu/) This technology could save many lives, but needs differential privacy to be secure. Differential privacy does not exist because of Google, was not invented by Google, and is part of the academic research of the crypto/security community. I can't speak about my company in aggregate, but I can speak about myself, and I and many of my peers do care about privacy, with cryptographically strong guarantees. I've been doing this for more then 20 years, shipped one of the first anonymizing web proxy servers in 1996, worked on early forms of crypto-currency, remailer and onion networks, long before they hit the public consciousness. The people interested in these things work on them because they believe in them and are passionate. Not everything people work on is done because of ads. Chrome didn't need to ship RAPPOR in 2014, there's no business model for it. Likely, it was driven by people who felt deeply about the need to do it. The other hyperbolic claims are not worth addressing.