Back in January and April of this year my colleague Kim LaCapria  and I wrote here about a growing trend of state courts what amounts to carte blanche in accessing your mobile phone location data from your provider without the need of a warrant.

First it was California where the California Supreme Court agreed:

“The majority opinion, written by Justice Ming Chin, cited precedents from the U.S. Supreme Court, saying the contents of a cell phone are like the contents of clothing or a cigarette pack found on a suspect’s person. The U.S. Supreme Court has found that those types of searches do not require a warrant under the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, the court said.”

Then along comes April and Kim relates the fact that Michigan State police have the ability using a technology from CelleBrite to make a duplicate of your cellphone contents without the need of a warrant. In her post Kim quotes the ACLU stance on this.

“With certain exceptions that do not apply here, a search cannot occur without a warrant in which a judicial officer determines that there is probable cause to believe that the search will yield evidence of criminal activity,” Fancher wrote. “A device that allows immediate, surreptitious intrusion into private data creates enormous risks that troopers will ignore these requirements to the detriment of the constitutional rights of persons whose cell phones are searched.”

One of the arguments against the police being able to do this is that their actions could violate our Fourth Amendment rights; and for the most part the courts have sided with the police and saying it doesn’t.

However on Monday Judge Nicholas Garaufis, of the Eastern District of New York totally rejected this line of reasoning.

The federal government had asked the courts to order Verizon Wireless to turn over 113 days of location data about a suspect’s cell phone. It did so under a provision of the Stored Communications Act that only requires law enforcement to show that the records are “relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

Does the government violate the Constitution when it obtains location data without meeting the Fourth Amendment’s “probable cause” standard? Some courts have found that it does not. But in a 22-page opinion, Judge Garaufis analyzed and rejected these other courts’ arguments, holding that law enforcement needs a warrant to obtain months of location data.

“The fiction that the vast majority of the American population consents to warrantless government access to the records of a significant share of their movements by ‘choosing’ to carry a cell phone must be rejected,” he wrote. “In light of drastic developments in technology, the Fourth Amendment doctrine must evolve to preserve cell-phone user’s reasonable expectation of privacy in cumulative cell-site-location records.”

via Ars Technica

It’s nice to see that like the judge in Ohio we have a Federal judge who is forward thinking enough to know that technology is a rapidly changing landscape and our interpretations of the Constitution need to be constantly adjusted to keep up with the changes.

That whole no warrant needed for your mobile phone location info – not so fast says Federal Court is a post from: The Inquisitr

Okay, this isn’t really about the homeless and their doggie friends but it is about dogs getting some treats if their owner’s check in.

Look, I get the whole Twitter thing, in fact I use it daily and like it a lot; however I do not get this whole Fourquare, Gowalla, or any of those stupid location check in services where you vie for totally useless badges and get to broadcast where you are. Ya. Okay.

Anyway it seems that a dog food company has set up a billboard that in conjunction with Foursquare will dole out some samples of their product when the human part of the equation checks in at the billboard location.

I’m sure this might strike some as a smart marketing move but as far as I am concerned this is just moronic, much like the location stuff itself.

via Geekosystem

[Moron Dept.] Homeless check in to feed their doggie friends some treats is a post from: The Inquisitr

I don’t normally get irritated right off the bat about some of the silliness that gets written about social media and the various popular services out there but by the time that I got to the end of Martin Bryant’s post at The Next Web about the agony of Foursquare being down that point had been surpassed.

Most of the post was alright but it was his ending that really cinched my immediate irritation factor. It is one thing to wax poetically about how the different kinds of users will be upset about Foursquare being down but it is another thing to suggest that they are some sort of repository of once in a lifetime events that will be around for time immemorial is ridiculous.

Those who use it to keep a record of places they’ve been in life might be most annoyed; you can’t check in retrospectively. I’m writing this post on a London to Manchester train after a weekend in the capital. My possibly once-in-a-lifetime visits to locations well outside my everyday routine today are lost forever.

Look don’t take this personally Martin because it’s not meant that way but really … Foursquare and once in a lifetime memories that won’t be the same because you couldn’t mark them on some digital map because the service is down. Seriously. Do you realize how silly that sounds?

The fact is, thinking that anything posted on Foursquare that has to do with treasured moments will last in perpetuity is mind boggling, especially from someone who has seen more web services come and go that most people visit new places.

Anyone that thinks that companies like Foursquare are going to be around for any real length of time (be lucky to see them still here in 5 years) is dreaming. Not only are we talking about a service that is nothing more than a feature which is going to be implemented by the big players but they don’t intend on being around long enough to become a memory lock-box for your children to rummage through. Their only viable business plan is to get bought and then what happens to your cherished memories?

Being upset that some perceived treasured moment is lost because you couldn’t mark it on a map and because of this is lost forever is silly. The reality is that the moment you mark it on that map you might as well count on it being lost at some point. If you want those types of memories to be around forever take a picture and hard copy it to a picture album.

Why Foursquare being down doesn’t matter and if it does you need a new life is a post from: The Inquisitr

Sunshine over at Liveside has news of a new service from AT&T called FamilyMap that aims to help parents keep track of their kids in real time, as long as they have a cellphone that is. The only phone service that doesn’t support FamilyMap is the PrePaid or Go services.

The idea behind FamilyMap is that once you log onto the service’s web site, using a PC or mobile device, you will be able to see your child’s whereabouts via a Microsoft Virtual Earth map. As well there is a Bird’s Eye view the location of where your child is. Additionally you can sign up for alerts at specific times to let you know where your child is.

The service is free for the first 30 days but after that you can look to fork over $14.99 a month to keep using it. You can also locate up to 5 family members which could make for some rather interesting dinner time discussions.

“So honey where were you today at 5:46 PM? – and don’t lie to me because I know where you were!”

picture courtesy of Liveside

New AT&T service good for kids not so good for husbands is a post from: The Inquisitr

Fire Eagle lets users either manually enter their location throughout the day or authorize their cell phones or computer applications to do it for them. They can also set privacy preferences to determine who can access that information. Developers can then use that data to build “geo-aware applications.”

Pownce has been one of the services testing the platform for its users’ location fields. Other services already using Fire Eagle include Web publishing system Moveable Type, interactive story site Dipity, and social network location manager Loki.

Fire Eagle is an open platform and can be integrated into most any application.

Yahoo Opens Up Location with Fire Eagle is a post from: The Inquisitr