Why Does the Cell Phone Association Oppose Location-Tracking Warrant Requirement?
CTIA, the industry association representing wireless phone carriers, is opposing proposed California legislation that would require the police to get a warrant before accessing a person鈥檚 location records from a cellphone company.
The association opposes the warrant requirement, and also opposes a requirement that carriers publicly disclose how often and why they share information with law enforcement.
As Declan McCullagh notes in his for CNET,
by advancing this argument, CTIA risks creating the perception that its member companies are happy to open their databases of customers' GPS coordinates to law enforcement -- just so long as nobody knows about it.
McCullagh also notes that wireless carriers receive significant fees for giving their customers鈥 data to law enforcement. What it looks like is that the wireless carriers want to continue betraying some customers (mobile phone users) to please others (law enforcement), and continue raking in money from both.
As my colleague Nicole Ozer at the 老澳门开奖结果 of Northern California :
The wireless industry鈥檚 opposition letter claims it would 鈥渦nduly burdensome鈥 to tell Californians what is happening because they are already so busy giving your location data to law enforcement. Their letter says, 鈥淭hese reporting mandates would unduly burden wireless providers and their employees 鈥 who are working day and night to assist law enforcement鈥︹ . . . .
It hasn鈥檛 been too burdensome for Sprint Nextel to process from law enforcement. In December 2009, Sprint鈥檚 Electronic Surveillance team manager that the company鈥檚 automated web systems for law enforcement requests 鈥渉as just really caught on fire with law enforcement鈥 and 鈥渋s extremely inexpensive to operate and easy.鈥
Why do the carriers even keep detailed records of our movements? As we鈥檝e told them before, that isn鈥檛 something they should even be doing without the affirmative permission and knowledge of their customers.