Waze stole data from PhantomAlert, company claims

Whoever was in at the ground level of Waze is now filthy rich: Google acquired the company for a whopping $1Billion in 2013. Now the owner of PhantomAlert, a competing app, is claiming that Waze’s success was gained illegally, and the story is pretty interesting.

Back in 2010, the Waze CEO approached PhantomAlert for a partnership. They wanted to “share data”. PhantomAlert declined, because Waze didn’t have enough data to make it worth PhantomAlert’s while. So what did Waze do? They allegedly took the data without asking, virtually tracking and copying all of PhantomAlert’s content for use in their own app.

Hefty claims, but PhantomAlert says they can back it up: apparently they planted fake location information in the database that nobody else would ever have in their database, because the information is completely fake. But what do you know, the Waze database was supposedly riddled with these fake data points.

There are two sides to every story, and you can be sure Google will have no problem telling their side in court, with a very decorated team of menacing attorneys. Or maybe they’ll settle, but with $1 Billion on the line, you never really know.

Either way, one look at PhantomAlert’s falling rating in the Play Store may indicate that they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.