Last year, owners of the Leaf, Nissan’s hot new electric car, got an unfortunate surprise along with their phenomenal 99 miles per gallon: a sharp-eyed security blogger revealed that Leafs secretly reported their owners’ location, speed and direction to websites that other users could then access through a built-in RSS reader. Nissan did not warn customers that this information was being passed on to various third parties without their consent. Leaf owners are hardly alone. In the past few years, there have been reports that iPhones and Android smart phones have been secretly sending Apple and Google information on users’ whereabouts. (VIEWPOINT: The Government Would Like to Keep Reading Your E-Mail) Locational privacy is the next frontier in the privacy wars. More than 110 million Americans have smart phones, and millions more have GPS devices and other high-tech gadgets that keep track of where they are. Companies are eager to know our whereabouts in order to serve up location-based ads and services — you’re taking a business trip, and all of a sudden you’re getting offers online from local restaurants. And app makers are selling apps like the now infamous Girls Around Me that allow people to follow other people. The trouble is, a lot of us do not want big corporations — or the government or strangers — knowing our comings and goings. Minnesota Democratic Senator Al Franken has drafted a bill that would require companies to get customers’ consent before collecting data on their location or sharing it with nongovernmental third parties. The act has solid bipartisan support. That is not surprising for a piece of legislation informally known as the Stalking Apps Bill. But industry may yet succeed in blocking it. (MORE: Are We Guilty of Oversharenting? Why We Owe Our Kids Online Privacy) To put it simply, privacy law in the U.S. is a mess. We do not have any major, overarching federal protections; instead, there are a few laws that focus on discrete issues (health care privacy, privacy for children) or specific situations. For example,![]()
