I used to work for TomTom and they run a live-traffic analysis service to help them with taking current traffic into account with route planning.

They buy anonymized live location data from telcos for that, called probes, which go for about $1 per year.

Then a few years after Android started Google suddenly came out with a live traffic service with similar resolution for free.

I already had a pretty strong suspicion of what their cheap source of probes was :)