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posted by LaminatorX on Tuesday January 27 2015, @05:56AM   Printer-friendly
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/

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Kromagv0 on Friday January 30 2015, @05:38PM

    by Kromagv0 (1825) on Friday January 30 2015, @05:38PM (#139560) Homepage

    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).

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    T-Shirts and bumper stickers [zazzle.com] to offend someone
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