Waze sued by competitor that planted data to catch thieves
A recently filed lawsuit alleges that popular navigation app Waze was caught stealing proprietary information from a rival about the location of red light cameras and other points of interest.
The suit was filed by PhantomAlert Inc., a smaller competitor of Waze. The company claims to have identified theft by planting inaccurate information in its database of speed cameras, speed traps and school zones. When some of those false or misplaced listings started showing up on Waze in late 2012, the company started investigating, according to Karl Kronenberger, an attorney for the company.
On Tuesday, PhantomAlert sued Waze in U.S. district court in San Francisco, seeking unspecified damages.
Seeding computer servers with false information, a tactic known as honeypotting, is an increasingly popular way to both thwart and better understand cybercriminals.
In this case, Kronenberger said, the bad data might have confused a few drivers, but it helped make clear that “PhantomAlert data was in the Waze database.” PhantomAlert sells to both consumers and other companies.
SIGN UP for the free California Inc. business newsletter >>
Waze, which Google bought for more than $1 billion in 2013, declined to comment.
In 2010, PhantomAlert rejected an offer from Waze to share databases because Waze had less content to offer, according to the lawsuit. The alleged copying amounts to infringement because PhantomAlert curated its database to make it more “relevant to users” and was thus copyrighted, Kronenberger said. That included moving on-screen red light camera alerts to appear in the middle of the block to give users more time to react. For Waze to display the same locations a significant number of times was suspicious, he said.
Chat with me on Twitter @peard33.
MORE FROM TECHNOLOGY
Uber drivers granted class-action status in legal battle
Amazon lets Prime members download videos to watch offline
Hackers attack jailbroken iOS devices, accessing 225,000 Apple accounts
