Radar detector company Escort invented a new technique to help drivers avoid police traps, based on data mining and crowd sourcing. In a nutshell, car drivers use a mobile app on their cell phone to report any police trap or red-light camera, with just one click that will automatically provide location of the trap on a social network and alert other drivers using the mobile app in question. 

It will be interesting to see how highway patrols and local police respond to being outsmarted by data mining techniques and crowd sourcing.

Here's the article: 

In the cat-and-mouse game of avoiding police radar, speeders are about get a potent new weapon: each other in an automatic socialnetwork.

 Two major radar detector makers are introducing features that automatically share the location of police or photo speed traps or red-light cameras with all others on the system. Both show how "crowd sourcing" — linking people to share mass information — promises to revolutionize transportation by giving motorists real-time traffic datareported by fellow travelers.

Going on sale today is a system from detector maker Escort, based in West Chester, Ohio. Escort hopes to have "hundreds of thousands" of Escort Live networked devices in place within a year. The system consists of nothing more than a new power cord for an Escort unit, costing $79, that transmits radar sightings to the user's GPS-enabled smartphone. The phone then will automatically transmit the information to all others nearby in the network. About 2 million drivers have Escort units.

Read full version at http://www.delawareonline.com/article/20111024/BUSINESS09/111023024...