New Connected Cycle smart pedal tracks thieves

At first glance this is a good idea but comes up short on a number of fronts.
1. There is no indication that your bike is protected with a tracking system. To a prospective thief it looks like any unlocked bike ripe for stealing. These 'stealth' systems may mean your bike get stolen more often because a thief is not discouraged in any way.
2. But you can track the bike...yes but gps systems are easy to block and have low accuracy of location in built up areas. How do you block these? Using tin foil as a Faraday cage is one option. Another is to buy a gps jammer on ebay. Then you just ride the bike away for the easiest steal ever.
3. Price - other gps based systems are over £100 so this is likely to be close to that.
4. Only basic flat pedal offered - no clipless or toe clip version offered and these are likely to be the buyers who want to use the data gathering function.
5. in order to make the pedal secure a unique key would have to be offered to EVERY owner. This is not possible. Specialist companies that specialise in these key/bolt combinations such as Bryce Fastners in the US require a minimum 2500 units (bolts) per unique key. If they manage to sell 25000 units there will only be 10 unique keys out there. Sure that will offer some protection but is not 1 key per bolt strong.

Great for hire bikes.

For personal use, can you configure where it sends the live tracking or does it only track to Big Brother and their app? What happens when they close their server?

Make some clippy versions of them and I'm in.

You know what this would be brilliant for?

Hire bikes - citywide schemes like the Barclays Cycle Hire. At the moment, they can track individual bikes between docking stations - they know it was taken at Euston and dropped at Waterloo for example - but they don't know the route taken to get there - did the rider use a Cycle Superhighway, did they get lost, did they take the direct A-road route, did they go via some tourist spots...?

Strava is no good since very few people use it on hire bikes but having an automatic system that does it without the rider thinking about it - get a year's worth of data out of that, you've got a mapping tool to work out cycle hotspots, favoured routes etc and then work out where/how to concentrate your resources in terms of developing cycle infrastructure. Or you can cross reference it to accident statistics.

Ugly.

Better to put a tracker in the seat tube. For the rest there is your cycle computer, mobile phone, gps unit, etc which you can remove from your bike.

It's a nice idea, but I am afraid that it won't work for the majority of cyclists. Most people will choose to put gps tracker in the saddle or head tube and cycle with pedals they like. Overpriced pedals with a gps in it...