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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: 3, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Tuesday January 27 2015, @08:10PM
Any crowd-sourced rating system is only marginally useful in my experience. People will give them 0-star reviews "because he ticketed me and I'm mad I got caught," not "because he ticketed/detained me in an unlawful manner and I am actually sure it's a violation of a specific right I posess."
Plus, y'know, the cops will start anonymously uprating themselves.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"