The back and forth discussion regarding location privacy continues to heat up. On March 3, the Electronic Frontier Foundation issued a joint press release with the American Civil Liberties Union of the National Capital Area stating a motion had been filed with a United States appeals court urging it to 
reject government claims that federal agents be allowed to attach GPS tracking devices to citizen vehicles without a warrant.
The case that raised the issue involved FBI agents planting a GPS device on a vehicle parked on private property, and then tracking the vehicle’s movement every ten seconds for a month.
The real issue is much bigger. The advocacy groups believe that without some sort of restriction on this type of behavior, the government could amass a giant database of peoples movements completely unbeknownst to them. This is a variant of the same issue that is currently plaguing major social networks such as Facebook and search engine Google–in those cases though, neither company is doing anything I consider wrong other than neglecting to properly educate consumers. At the end of the day however, giant companies such as Google are susceptible to government pressures as well.
According to the EFF though, Google is prepared to fight any government attempt to force it to turn over location data from its newly launched friend finder Latitude. Mobile social network Loopt has also committed to this. Both companies state that user location data would not be turned over to police or other government institutions without a wiretap order.
I should clarify that neither Google or Loopt store your location data when using either service. Each time you update your location, the previous update is overwritten. So really the wiretap order would be required for either company to track where you are in real-time, because there is no database of location data.
I’m not sure if either company has been in a situation where these public commitments have had to be enforced. Not that I’m aware of, but I’d love to see how each would react if really faced with such a government request.
