Declan McCullagh writes:
Draft legislation would provide new privacy protections for Americans by requiring police to obtain search warrants to track the locations of cars and cell phones.
The forthcoming bill being prepared by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) and reviewed by ZDNet Asia’s sister site CNET would provide legal protections for “geolocation information”, meaning data that can locate a person through a wireless device or through a GPS tracker placed on a vehicle.
Even though police are tapping into the locations of mobile phones and implanting GPS bugs thousands of times a year, the legal ground rules remain unclear, and federal privacy laws written a generation ago are ambiguous at best. Courts have split over how easy it should be for police to track Americans electronically, and whether the same rules should apply to live tracking and obtaining stored information about someone’s earlier whereabouts.
Read more on ZDnet.