MANILA, Philippines – Waze announced Thursday, October 2, a partnership program with a number of local governments around the world to share data in an effort to improve traffic conditions in specific areas. 

The Next Web reported that Waze’s program – the Connected Citizens initiative – will give real-time anonymized crowdsourced traffic data to government departments.

In exchange, the partners will give Waze information on public projects, such as pre-planned events like road closures and construction.

The first 10 partners include:

• Jakarta, Indonesia
• Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
• Barcelona, Spain and the Government of Catalonia
• Tel Aviv, Israel
• San Jose, Costa Rica
• Boston, USA
• State of Florida, USA
• State of Utah, USA
• Los Angeles County
• The New York Police Department (NYPD)

Five additional government partners have also signed up, with more on the way, Waze added.

The company said this data-sharing initiative only affects publicly shared information, such as alerts and closures.

All data we are sharing is publicly available on Waze #WazeW10

— waze (@waze) October 2, 2014

Di-Ann Eisnor, head of Growth at Waze also reiterated that the company would not be selling any data. “We don’t share anything beyond that, such as where individuals are located and who they are,” she said.

Eisnor added, “We keep [the data] clean by making sure we don’t have a business model around it.” – Rappler.com