If I remember correctly Magic Earth claims to get its traffic information from public sources, without using user’s locations like google. So no, location data is not strictly necessary for that.
But somehow, someone tracking it’s users, I can’t imagine other way to get data like this. Maybe some carsharing service, company fleet management or something like that.
Any app that knows traffic situation, knows it from your (and other users) location, so it obviously doesn’t know about traffic.
In openstreetmap it’s not recommended to map temporary things, and the map only updates once a month in OrganicMaps, so that’s also expected.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice#Don’t_map_temporary_events_and_temporary_features
If I remember correctly Magic Earth claims to get its traffic information from public sources, without using user’s locations like google. So no, location data is not strictly necessary for that.
It seems you are right: https://www.magicearth.com/faq/#traffic-and-events-help
It’s limited to mostly first world countries: https://www.magicearth.com/feature-availablity/#hd_traffic
But somehow, someone tracking it’s users, I can’t imagine other way to get data like this. Maybe some carsharing service, company fleet management or something like that.