Where Are We? - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 159

regarding private uses. State laws vary widely. A Minnesota court in 2011 acquit-
ted a man charged with illegally monitoring his estranged wife with a gps
tracker because he was co-owner of the car. 87 Texas and California prohibit
most gps tracking without consent, but a New York court upheld tracking a
government employee in his private vehicle after he had been caught falsify-
ing his time sheets. 88 Cases of this type seem sure to reach the Supreme Court
eventually.
Even before the Jones case reached the high court, lawmakers heard grow-
ing calls for clarity about how companies and law enforcement agencies can
use geolocation data generated by navigation and location-based services in
vehicles and smartphones. A media hullabaloo erupted in April 2011 after two
researchers announced at Where 2.0, a conference on “the business of loca-
tion,” their discovery that Apple's iPhones and iPads store users' time-stamped
location histories in “hidden” files.89 89 Apple quickly responded that it does not
track iPhone users and explained the files as a “cache” of recent Wi-Fi hot spots
and cell tower locations used to speed connectivity, like the temporary Internet
files stored in personal computers. 90 Apple characterized the year's worth of
location data stored on each phone as a “bug” and promised to fix it with a soft-
ware update that would limit storage to seven days. The company also acknowl-
edged that it was collecting anonymous traffic data to build a crowd-sourced
traffic service like that operated by Google Maps for Android phones, which
also cache Wi-Fi and cell tower data. The public uproar prompted a hearing by
the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law.
By the end of May 2011 House or Senate members had introduced at least
ten legislative proposals aimed at various aspects of consumer privacy and
data security. 91 A lack of cosponsors and little or no bipartisan support ham-
pered many of them. The leaders of the Bipartisan Congressional Privacy Cau-
cus, Rep. Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat, and Rep. Joe Barton, a
Texas Republican, secured more than forty cosponsors, including a half-dozen
Republicans, for the Do Not Track Kids Act of 2011, H.R. 1895 . 92 I t sought to
update the Children's Online Privacy Act of 1998 by prohibiting companies
from using or providing personal information to third parties about individu-
als younger than eighteen. 93 Momentum appeared to increase when Rep. Jason
Chaffetz, a Utah Republican, and Sen. Ron Wyden, an Oregon Democrat, in
June 2011 coauthored the bipartisan and bicameral Geolocational Privacy and
Surveillance (gps) Act, H.R. 2168 and S. 1212. 94 The House bill attracted twenty-
five cosponsors, mostly Democrats and some Republicans, but its companion