Google asked to muzzle Waze ‘police-stalking’ app by Lisa Vaas.
From the post:
GPS trackers on vehicles; stingray devices to siphon mobile phone IDs and their owners’ locations; gunshot-detection sensors; license plate readers: these are just some of the types of surveillance technologies used by law enforcement, often without warrants.
Now, US police are protesting the fact that citizens are using technology to track them, and they want Google to pull the plug on it.
The technology being used to track police – regardless of whether they’re on their lunch break, assisting with a broken-down vehicle on the highway, or hiding in wait to nab speeders – is part of a popular mobile app, Waze, that Google picked up in 2013.
Don’t you find it interesting that law enforcement has no apparent objection to mass surveillance and stalking of citizens but quickly rallies when effective crowd sourcing creates surveillance of the police?
Lisa seizes on the highly unusual killing of two New York police officers in Brooklyn last December to make this a police safety issue. Random events are going to happen whether citizens report police locations or not.
And if we are going to be “data-driven,” the numbers of line of duty deaths for police officers have been going downward for the past three years. 2011 – 171, 2012 – 122, 2013 – 102, so if Waze is having an impact on officer safety, it isn’t showing up in the data. Those numbers were collected by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.
Shouldn’t policy decisions on surveillance/stalking be driven by data? If you oppose Waze, where is your data?
Those are simple enough questions.
Forward this post to your local newspaper and police department. If there is data to oppose Waze, let’s everyone see it.
Yes?
PS: You can find more information on Waze at: https://www.waze.com/. Not only do I hope Waze keeps posting the location of police officers but I hope they add politicians, bankers, CIA/NSA staff to their map. Effective crowd sourcing may be our only defense against government overreaching. Help keep everyone free with your location contributions.