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 urza9814 on Thursday January 29 2015, @05:41PM
That's interesting -- every single time *I* hear about it, the officers had no damn reason to use lethal force *even if it was a real firearm*. Not sure what country you're from, but FYI, owning real firearms and even carrying them around in public is all perfectly legal in the US. Where I grew up you can hardly take the dog out for a walk without running into someone walking around with a real, loaded firearm -- often while engaged in illegal behavior -- and none of them were ever shot by the local police...