Location Privacy Protection Act 2011: Senators Want Apple, Google To Ask Customers Before Tracking

Senators Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) introduced on Wednesday legislation that takes aim at location-aware devices and apps and could force companies like Apple and Google to notify smartphone users when they're being tracked and how this information will be shared with third parties.

The Location Privacy Protection Act of 2011 (PDF) aims to "close current loopholes in federal law" and proposes that companies be required to obtain "express consent" from customers before collecting and/or sharing location data.

Franken's office released a summary of the bill that explains the need for such a measure: "Current federal laws allow many of the companies that obtain location information from their customers’ cellphones and smartphones to give that information to almost anyone they please—without their customers’ consent."

"Geolocation technology gives us incredible benefits, but the same information that allows emergency responders to locate us when we're in trouble is not necessarily information all of us want to share with the rest of the world,” Franken said Wednesday in a statement, according to The Hill.

After a May Senate hearing, chaired by Franken and conducted to investigate Apple and Google's smartphone location tracking practices, Franken penned a letter to both companies requesting that their respective app stores provide policy policies that outline personal data collection and usage.

Franken and Blumenthal's location privacy bill resembles, Geolocation Privacy and Surveillance (GPS) Act, a separate consumer privacy measure introduced on Wednesday by Senator Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah).

According to PCWorld, "The GPS Act goes further than the Location Privacy Protection Act--it gives law enforcement and the government guidelines on how they are able to use any consumer data."

Comments

[jsarets]

06:25 PM on 06/15/2011

Terms of service agreements are useless. Hardly anybody reads those documents. They're written for lawyers rather than users.

The key issue here is the inversion of traditional copyright practices enabled by the unique publishing models of the Internet. Traditionally, there have been a relatively small number of publishers facing a relatively large number of consumers. The publishers could dictate the terms of their copyright licenses, and the consumers could take it or leave it.

Today, a relatively small number of Internet applications are consuming content published by a relatively large number of users. The consumers are dictating copyright terms to the publishers, take it or leave it. While traditional publishers would frequently opt to reserve all rights, modern publishers are expected to waive all rights if they wish to use the application.

A record of one's movements among locations is a copyrightable work. It belongs to the individual who created it. It must be the right of that person to dictate the terms under which that work may be distributed. Content services must not be able to infringe on that right in their terms of service.

In particular:

Users must explicitly license local access to any data object by any application which did not create it.
Users must explicitly license distribution of any data objects to any Internet service.
Users must explicitly license redistribution of data objects by such Internet services to third parties.

The law must affirm the exclusive authority of copyright owners to assert the particular rights they wish to reserve or waive in terms of distributing their covered works.

[David Landry]

08:02 AM on 06/16/2011

F&F for being aware of one of the most important issues with todays Internet ... especially with this mad drive to move everything to the "cloud", where the owners of the cloud automatically have the upper hand in writing the terms of use for who will own the works published on those clouds.

[anastasiabeaverhousen]

06:12 PM on 06/15/2011

Al, I love you but I find it the height of irony that with the provisions of the Patriot Act, there's a bill in Congress to limit tracking people's locations. Is there a top secret codicil to the bill that says the gov't now owns the software and technology necessary to do said tracking?