This is the kind of attitude that Pieter Geelen was concerned about addressing when designing the documentation, disclosure, framing and user interface of TomTom Home's P2P map distribution system.

TomTom is highly dependent on the good will and trust of their customers to be willing to share real time traffic condition information with them.

There is an option to anonymize and upload statistics on traffic conditions to TomTom. It anonymizes it by not recording your identity, and not including the beginning and end of your trip, so your source and destination that could identify you are not revealed.

TomTom compiles all the information from different users, and feeds it back into the next map update, so the data you upload about roads you drive frequently eventually benefits you directly, and also benefits other users in your area, and TomTom of course.

(Of course the people who live on obscure roads that turn out to be efficient shortcuts don't think of it that way when convoys of truckers start blasting by their wooden houses all day and all night, vibrating their nails out of their holes and making road pizza out of their pets. But you can't please everyone all the time.)

The benefit to TomTom and its customers is enormous, since it enables their product to predict what the speed of traffic along each road will be at any time, weekday or weekend. But TomTom has to be very clear about how they use the information, and what the benefits and risks are, to maintain the trust of their customers.

A lot of the same issues apply to using customer upload bandwidth to share maps. TomTom would benefit from reduced bandwidth costs of course. And that could reduce the cost of distributing maps, some of which TomTom could pass on to customers, by offering cheaper subscriptions, more frequent updates, richer more detailed maps, etc. Users could also potentially benefit from faster downloads (especially in Australia).

BitTorrent DNA uses the CDN while the P2P network warms up, and if the P2P network isn't performing well, it will fall back to Akamai's servers of course, but there will always be some overhead in the worst cases.

The risks to TomTom in terms of the company's reputation and customer's trust are very important, because if TomTom rolled out a P2P based content distribution network that was perceived as being sneaky and serving its own purposes instead of the customer's, it could make people less willing to trust them enough to upload traffic information, and that's a lot more important to TomTom than saving a million euros a year on bandwidth costs.

There will always going to be people wearing aluminum foil hats with axes to grind, who substitute denominational punctuation characters for letters in your company's name, and who will never trust your company no matter what you do.

Even if they're willing to submit to all kinds of privacy intrusions, administrative fees and long lines, in order to get a license to drive a car, they would rather themselves and other TomTom users spend more time in traffic, more money on gas, and pollute the environment more, rather than upload and share their precious bodily fluids and traffic data.

There will always be people who will get pissed off about TomTom being so greedy to selfishly use their free upload bandwidth to distribute maps, because they're using it for pirating movies and downloading pornography, despite the fact that BitTorrent DNA is very careful not to abuse it (I mean abuse bandwidth, not porn).

There's nothing you can do about those people, but you do have to prevent the situation that a normal reasonable customer gets an unexpected bill from their ISP, and loses trust in your company.

It's really the fault of asshole ISPs like Comcast, who offer unlimited service with limits, throttle traffic, and charge ridiculous fees. Companies who want to use P2P like TomTom can't do anything about that, but understandably get blamed for it anyway. Education and disclosure and consent, and supporting laws preventing ISPs from screwing their customers, are the best ways to solve that problem.

So the TomTom Home user interface for P2P sharing had a page that explained the risks and benefits, and allowed users to opt in to the P2P file sharing feature, at the small risk to TomTom of not having as many people using the P2P network, which was a lot less than the large risk of losing the trust of their customers, and harming their precious traffic feedback collection.

It's ironic (or simply sad) that after Microsoft bought Skype, they switched from using P2P to using centralized servers, so their customers paid dearly in privacy instead of bandwidth.

Privacy isn't such a big issue with Spotify (unless you don't want the NSA to know you're into Nickelback -- hint: they already do, and they probably listen to it themselves). But they're always going to get complaints from non-paying customers who object to ads in their free music, yet hate how the record companies treat artists, and refuse to contribute their upload bandwidth, while at the same time run BitTorrent to pirate movies and porn.

On the other hand, I'll bet there are a lot of World of Warcraft players who would happier watching the real time telemetry of slower P2P downloads connecting to hundreds of other players around the world, than downloading updates quickly and quietly from one CND, just because of the trendy technology with cool blinking lights, and the social cachet of being part of the community sharing a new update through "the cloud". Privacy isn't an issue, and you're going to be using a lot of upload bandwidth when you're playing the game.

So the issues surrounding P2P are different for every company. But good non-technical approach in general is to frame P2P networking as cool and useful, instead of creepy and greedy.