Where Are We? - GPS Declassified: From Smart Bombs to Smartphones - page 160

in the Senate gained only one cosponsor, a Republican. 95 Sen. Al Franken, a
Minnesota Democrat, simultaneously introduced the Location Privacy Act of
2011, S. 1223, which garnered six cosponsors, five Democrats and one Inde-
pendent. 96 It was narrower in scope, focusing on commercial service provid-
ers, but industry officials in telecommunications, advertising, and marketing
cast a wary eye on all such bills. 97 More than a year later, none had emerged
from their committees for a vote. Just before the Senate recessed in August
2012, Wyden filed amendments to attach the bipartisan gps Act to the Cyber-
security Act of 2012, S. 3414, comprehensive legislation aimed at protecting
the nation's critical information infrastructure. 98 The Senate ultimately failed
to invoke cloture on S. 3414, and the 112th Congress recessed August 3 . 99 Clar-
ity on gps issues would have to wait as Congress faced partisan gridlock, a
presidential contest, and uncertain prospects for a lame-duck session filled
with even more pressing budget and tax issues.
Chaffetz and Wyden reintroduced the gps Act, H.R. 1312 and S. 639, in spring
2013 with substantially the same language. 100 As this topic went to production
both the House and Senate versions remained lodged in their respective com-
mittees. GovTrack.us assigned the House bill a 32 percent chance of being
enacted, while it gave the Senate version (with only one cosponsor) only a 1
percent chance of enactment. 101 The gps Act would require the government
to show probable cause and get a warrant before acquiring geolocational infor-
mation about any person in the United States. It would create criminal penal-
ties similar to those for wiretapping for anyone surreptitiously using electronic
devices to track a person's movements, and it would prohibit service providers
from sharing customers' geolocation information with third parties without
customer consent. 102
Buried in the fine print of a typical provider's terms and conditions is lan-
guage granting permission to share “aggregated or anonymous information
in various formats” with “trusted entities,” including retail, marketing, and
advertising companies that offer products that may be of interest. 103 That infor-
mation is valuable to the carriers. Pyramid Research, a Cambridge,
Massachusetts-based market research company that follows the telecom indus-
try, projected in mid-2011 that global location-based advertising revenues would
reach $6.2 billion by 2015, an exponential rise from $86 million in 2008. 104
Legal restrictions on using personal data could constrain the growth of location-
based services, observed Glen Gibbons, editor and publisher of Inside gnss
and former editor of gps Wo rld , who has followed the gps industry over sev-