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from the Not-that-NSA,-the-other-one. dept.
The US National Sheriffs' Association wants Google to block its crowd-sourced traffic app Waze from being able to report the position of police officers, saying the information is putting officer's lives at risk.
"The police community needs to coordinate an effort to have the owner, Google, act like the responsible corporate citizen they have always been and remove this feature from the application even before any litigation or statutory action," AP reports Sheriff Mike Brown, the chairman of the NSA's technology committee, told the association's winter conference in Washington.
Waze, founded in 2008 and purchased 18 months ago by Google for $1.1bn, has about 50 million users who anonymously share their locations to help gauge road traffic flows. The app also allows police reports and road closures to be added to maps and shared with other users.
Brown called the app a "police stalker," and said being able to identify where officers were located could put them at personal risk. Jim Pasco, executive director of the Fraternal Order of Police, said his members had concerns as well.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/01/26/nsa_gunning_for_google_wants_copspotting_taken_off_waze_app/
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Tuesday January 27 2015, @01:31PM
I am having trouble finding any sympathy for the police in this situation. It isn't like they don't do the same things to regular people [startribune.com] but instead of manually entering the information like the users of Waze do it is entirely automated so it grabs every license plate it happens to see. It isn't like people haven't been signaling to other drivers that a cop is ahead for ages, with bear checks, or flashing of brights on the highway during the day.
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
(Score: 2) by halcyon1234 on Wednesday January 28 2015, @01:56PM
Not every day this happens but... I've never heard of this one, and Google's no help. Can you define a bear check?
Original Submission [thedailywtf.com]
(Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Friday January 30 2015, @05:38PM
Old CB lingo. Request a bear check between point X & Y on highway A heading direction B. Other truckers respond back with locations of and types of bears [wikipedia.org] (cops).
T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone