U.S. courts wrestle with legality of using mobile device location data to track criminals

Mobile Privacy Issues

Congress and courts across the country are working to understand the balance between a criminal’s right to privacy and the need of law enforcement to be able to locate criminals, as they debate over the use of global positioning systems (GPS), which are a technology commonly found in most new mobile phones and other devices, for tracking criminals. In Maryland, U.S. District Judge Susan K. Gauvey, has denied federal authorities a warrant that they were seeking in order to locate a suspect through the use of the GPS data in…

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Mobile Device Users Can be Tracked Using Google Web Mapping

Geotargeting

Google customers whose mobile device Wi-Fi is on may have their previous whereabouts available for anyone to track on the Web.  Among Google’s practices is the publication of the probable location of millions of mobile devices that have active Wi-Fi connection.  This is only the latest of a number of discoveries being made this year regarding the tracking and locating of mobile devices, and the associated privacy issues.  One example of this occurrence is with Android phones which have enabled location services.  They regularly send location data stamped with the…

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