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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 Arik on Tuesday January 27 2015, @04:44PM
You kind of touch on this as you go on but you dont make it very explicit. This is true or very false, depending on what you posit to be the desired effect of the speed trap.
SUPPOSEDLY these things are there for purposes of safety - getting people to slow down. And if that is actually the goal, publicizing them, far from making them ineffective, is actually a force multiplier making them much more effective. If that's your goal, you don't hide the cruiser, in fact you put up warning signs instead. This actually induces people to check (and appropriately reduce) their speed.
But the *real* goal has nothing to do with safety, and everything to do with "revenue." To protect and serve... themselves.
If laughter is the best medicine, who are the best doctors?