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NSA Gunning for Google, wants Cop-spotting Dropped from Waze App

posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday January 27 2015, @05:56AM   Printer-friendly
from the Not-that-NSA,-the-other-one. dept.

AnonTechie writes:

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/

 
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 27 2015, @05:19PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 27 2015, @05:19PM (#138578)

    Arrests may mean more paperwork, but arrest numbers are used to justify continually increasing budgets. If your police force is keeping crime at bay through visibility & patrols then their budget will suffer until they are no longer able to be successful. Once the crime rate starts going up (due to the budget cuts) they'll get a budget increase.

    It's all about the money. It's always about the money.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 28 2015, @07:45AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 28 2015, @07:45AM (#138791)

    good point.
    it seems that people working for the police force don't mind if their work costs more money and thus requires more taxes because they either don't pay taxes or are ahead of the "tax-incress" curve, that is they gain more by being expensive and paying more taxes ... hmmm ... maybe the police force should invest in more crime?