The Verge reports that Franken will soon introduce the Location Privacy Protection Act of 2012 in Congress. It’s a retread of the same named bill from 2011 that sought to give mobile device users a choice over whether or not companies could track them when GPS services are turned on.

Aside from companies having to seek permission before being able to use tracking info, the bill would also target those who use GPS and related technologies to stalk others. It’s likely the bill, if passed, would make revenge porn operations, like the ones operated by Hunter Moore, illegal. It would also create an investigative team at the National Institute of Justice that would look into how geolocation is being used in violence against women.

Franken’s bill sounds pretty good, and would go a long way towards protecting people’s privacy when using smartphones. The only problem is that the bill has next to no chance of success. The previous bill from 2011 never got out of committee and the 112th Congress has bigger fish to fry (i.e. fiscal cliff) before it’s convened on January 3.

In all likelihood, Franken will have to try to pass his bill during the next Congress alongside everybody else who had aspirations of passing Internet or privacy bills this year.

TomTom says that they will preview the new app at IFA 2012 today

“We aim to make TomTom content and services available to as many devices and platforms as we can,” says Corinne Vigreux, Managing Director at TomTom. “Bringing TomTom navigation to Android smartphones is, therefore, a significant milestone for us.”

The full-fledged Android app will features on-board maps, IQ routes, HD traffic, advanced lane guidance, 2D/3D driving views, and even speed cameras (for a small in-app fee) – technology that TomTom users should be very familiar with.

Android users have been able to downloaded the TomTom Places app, which allows them to search for places of interest like hotels, stores, and restaurants, for awhile now. But this is the first time that a fully-realized TomTom navigation app will hit Android.

Earlier this month, Google maps gave live traffic updates to many more cities across the globe, including 130 smaller cities within the United States. Of course, a TomTom Android app would be in direct competition with Google’s own map service.

In other navigation app news, we heard a report yesterday that Facebook may be interested in Waze. Whether or not its for a collaboration or an acquisition is unknown at this point.

According to Globes, the two companies have already had discussions – as Facebook execs apparently visited Waze offices in Israel. “The purpose of the talks is not known, but the two companies are reportedly headed for collaboration, possibly involving the use of Waze’s application via Facebook. Alternatively, Facebook may acquire Waze,” they say.

Waze is originally an Israeli startup, although they do operate a main office in Palo Alto, California.

Although Waze provides GPS services and free turn-by-turn navigation, one of its most interesting uses is as a giant traffic crowdsourcing platform. People can report accidents, traffic issues, speed traps, and much more. The app is constantly morphing, as it reacts to information gathered from drivers using the service. It’s a truly community-oriented GPS application.

So, one could see Facebook and Waze working well together, considering the nearly 1 billion Facebook users who could add to Waze’s crowdsourced traffic data.

This is not the only Israeli company that has (reportedly) attracted Facebook’s attention. Earlier this year, the company acquired Tel-Aviv-based facial recognition software company Face.com.

[via Forbes]

A shell company going by the name of Silver State Intellectual Technologies, Inc. has brought a patent lawsuit against Foursquare. The patents in question are for the “System and method for user navigation” and “GPS publication application server.” In other words, these guys are suing Foursquare over GPS.

Of course, GPS is in everything these days, so why go after only Foursquare? Only the company controlling Silver State Intellectual Technologies knows for sure, but it’s odd that they’re only going after Foursquare. Other companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google rely heavily on GPS for their services. They may have their own GPS patents or license other patents, but it’s still a confusing choice nonetheless.

The ubiquity of GPS in today’s world makes this case odd nonetheless. This is just another reason to push for core technologies like GPS to be included in the basic technologies that all companies can license at an affordable cost. We probably won’t see any progress on patent laws until larger companies are forced to stop hiding behind shell companies for their patent litigation.

If you want to see how flimsy Silver State’s argument is, check out the court document below. It appears that they don’t even know how Foursquare is violating their patent, but that’s not going to stop the patent trolls.

Silver State v Foursquare

[h/t: GigaOm]

Thanks to a find over at Laughing Squid (Via The World’s Best Ever and PBS’ America Revealed), we now have an idea of what it looks like being a Domino’s Pizza delivery driver in New York City on a Friday night, which is to say, busy as hell:

Considering New York City is a pizza town, it wouldn’t be the least bit surprising to see a local shop outperform a competing Domino’s that services the same neighborhood. Unfortunately, the visualization isn’t the longest we’ve been privy to, PBS’ brief visualization reveals plenty about the routines of a New York City pizza delivery driver.

According to a report this afternoon by Bloomberg, the company has debts and assets of over $1 billion. Negotiations between the company and its creditors broke down over the creditors’ insistence that Falcone leave the company.

LightSquared was founded to created a nationwide 4G LTE network that relied both on existing cellular towers and satellites. It faced significant regulatory concern, though, over the fact that the spectrum on which the LightSquared would operate was dangerously close to that used by the Global Position System. Numerous organizations, including the United States Air Force, which currently runs the GPS system, gathered to protest LightSquared’s plans, and sought to block the network’s implementation.

In February, the FCC ruled that the GPS interference from LightSquared’s network would be unavoidable, and that LightSquared’s earlier conditional authorization to proceed should be revoked.

The FCC’s ruling effectively killed LightSquared’s plans, leaving the company with no way to pay its bills. After attempts to negotiate with creditors failed, the company filed for bankruptcy this morning in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in Manhattan. The company said in a statement today that it hopes to use the time gained by the filing to restructure the company and continue to work to “resolve regulatory issues” that have thus far interfered with the company’s plans.

When I switched from a Blackberry to an iPhone, two things immediately irked me: lack of a raised QWERTY keyboard; and lousy battery life. Soon, friends clued me in to the fact that GPS and 3G were the biggest drains on my battery. So I learned how to better manage my location services, and how to get on Wi-Fi whenever possible. That, and how to carry a cord with me everywhere and plug in anytime I am not walking.

These two principles – GPS and 3G – are at the heart of ad module problems. Researchers have shown that popular free smartphone apps spend up to 75 percent of their energy tracking the user’s geographical location, sending information about the user to advertisers and downloading ads.

“It turns out the free apps aren’t really free because they contain the hidden cost of reduced battery life,” said Y. Charlie Hu, a Purdue University professor of electrical and computer engineering.

Because smartphone batteries must be small and lightweight, power consumption is a major issue, the researcher said. He has led work to create a new tool called Eprof – for energy profiler – to analyze how much energy a smartphone app consumes. New findings show that 65 percent to 75 percent of the energy used to run free apps is spent for advertising-related functions.

“We performed an in-depth case study, the first of its kind, of six popular smartphone apps, including Angry Birds, Facebook and Android Browser,” said Purdue doctoral student Abhinav Pathak.

The free Angry Birds app was shown to consume about 75 percent of its power running “advertisement modules” in the software code and only about 25 percent for actually playing the game. The modules perform marketing functions such as sharing user information and downloading ads.

“We believe it is mainly to provide information about the user’s geographical location so the ads can be more targeted or customized to that location,” Hu said.

Findings will be detailed in a research paper being presented during the EuroSys 2012 conference on April 10-13 in Bern, Switzerland. The paper, written by Pathak, Hu and Ming Zhang, a researcher at Microsoft Research, also suggests a general approach for improving the energy efficiency of smartphone apps. An application may contain tens of thousands of lines of code, broken down into many components called subroutines, threads and processes. Eprof maps how much energy comes from each component, representing a new way for researchers to study smartphone energy consumption without using a power meter, an expensive and cumbersome piece of laboratory equipment.

“This is the first tool of its kind ever developed for modern smartphones,” Pathak said. “We’ve seen around 1 million apps written since smartphones emerged roughly five years ago, but there has been no systematic way for the developer to see how much energy the different components consume. Using this tool, you can see what should be changed to improve energy efficiency.”

The smartphone power drain is caused by a combination of factors including inefficient programs and software glitches called “energy bugs,” Hu said.

“Eprof tells you how much energy is spent where,” he said. “This may be due to energy bugs or other reasons.”

In one case, a piece of advertising software embedded in a free app failed to turn off its connection to the Internet, a function called a socket, requiring another piece of code to resolve the problem and wasting energy. Inefficient power usage is most likely to occur in interactive programs, which are prevalent in smartphone apps such as games and applications that heavily use built-in phone gadgets like GPS, the camera, compass and “proximity sensor.” A particular source of power inefficiency is a phenomenon called “tails.” In principle, after an application sends information to the Internet, the “networking unit” that allows the phone to connect to the Internet should go to a lower power state within a fraction of a second. However, researchers found that after the advertising-related modules finish using the network, the networking unit continues draining power for about seven seconds.

“The past assumption has been that, whenever you see usage you have power consumption, and when there is no usage there is no power consumption,” Hu said. “This does not hold true for smartphones.”

The tails are a phenomenon of several smartphone hardware components, including 3G, or third-generation wireless systems, GPS and WiFi, not flaws within the app software itself. However, software developers could sidestep the problem by modifying apps to minimize the effect of tails, Hu said.

“Any time you use the 3G network, there will be a tail after the usage,” Hu said. “The ad module in Angry Birds obviously uses 3G for network uploading and downloading, while the game itself did not, which is why we blame the ad module for the tail.”

Battery drain in smartphones has emerged as a fundamental problem.

“We’ve been hearing about major problems lately in power usage,” Hu said. “A smartphone battery is generally expected to last a day before recharging, but we’re hearing about mysterious instances where the battery runs out in a few hours. Users have been complaining about this on Internet forums.”

Findings in the paper suggest a way to improve energy efficiency with a technique that has been shown to reduce the energy consumption of four apps by 20 percent to 65 percent. The ultimate goal is to develop an “energy debugger” that automatically pinpoints flaws in software and fixes them without the intervention of a human software developer, Hu said. Eprof mirrors a tool created three decades ago called Gprof, which tracks how much time is consumed by software components.

“If a program runs for three hours, Gprof tells you how much time is spent on each subroutine,” Hu said. “We’ve taken this to a whole new level with Eprof to show how much energy is consumed.”

The same researchers first created a model making the new profiler tool possible and presented a paper about the model at last year’s EuroSys conference. The model estimates how much power a smartphone is using while an app is running.

But while “about” 3,000 trackers were, at least temporarily, turned off (only about 10% of them permanently, according to NPR), nobody really seems to know exactly how many devices are out there. Forbes staff writer Kashmir Hill writes:

So what are the actual numbers here? According to an FBI spokesperson, the Bureau doesn’t exactly know either. A spokesman says the 3,000 number referred to the “universe of trackers” — and may reflect the total used over a given year, or the total in use at any one time, or someone’s dartboard score. “It’s an oversimplification,” said an FBI spokesperson.

…

“The problem is there’s no national database,” says Scott Burns, executive director of the National District Attorneys Association. “I can say, anecdotally, that across the country, prosecutors now have to meet with law enforcement to prepare affidavits and warrants when they want to use a tracker.”

The FBI complains that the new restriction makes it tough on law enforcement to do its job efficiently. “We have a number of people in the United States whom we could not indict, there is not probable cause to indict them or to arrest them who present a threat of terrorism,” said FBI Director Robert Mueller in a House Appropriations Committee hearing earlier this month. But that’s kind of the point of the Fourth Amendment, which guarantees that the balance of power between citizens and law enforcement will not be tipped too unfairly in the government’s favor.

So now a lot of agencies are having to go old-school on suspects, says NPR, using teams of up to eight agents to tail and photograph people whom they suspect of a crime, but for whom they have found no probable cause or sufficient evidence to obtain a warrant.

The jury’s still out (kind of literally — see what I did there?) on other forms of digital tracking. Your location can already be tracked via your cell or smart phone, even if you’re not anybody’s foursquare mayor. And most new cars being rolled out today are equipped with some sort of built-in GPS device. Forbes’s Hill reports that two recent cases have met with contradicting rulings over the legality of government’s tracking you on your own devices. So the precedent’s still up in the air. Just as law enforcement agents have been advised to play it conservative and get a warrant before electronically tracking citizens, I’m also going to bet that until a single ruling becomes precedent, or a case heads to the Supreme Court, agencies are probably going to use your devices if that’s their easiest course of option. Better to ask forgiveness than permission, right?

So in the meantime, if you care about your privacy, what can you do to make sure you’re not being tracked? Well, I’d tell you to pay for everything in cash, use disposable cell phones, and keep your head down in the presence of security cameras.

But that’d probably be cause enough to get you followed, if you weren’t already.

[Forbes, NPR, Photo Cred: IFixIt]

Colin Fraser is leading a class action lawsuit against Asustek for their Transformer Prime tablet. The lawsuit alleges that the metallic case of the tablet makes its GPS and Wi-Fi capabilities useless according to Courthouse News Service.

Fraser opens with his ordering of the tablet in December of 2011. Before it even arrived to his home, he was made aware of “hardware problems … relating to Transformer Prime’s GPS and Wi-Fi capabilities.”

The plaintiff states that in a letter from Asus’ customer service department, the company acknowledged the problem and said it was a “result of the spun aluminum back panel which effectively blocks GPS signals.”

Fraser goes on to say that numerous blogs and forums discussed the issues the tablet was having and even created an online petition for a fix or recall. Asus, according to the plaintiff, said that only a few in the first batch “were victims of this design flaw and they recalled 300 units.”

The petition didn’t find Asus’ solution to be satisfactory, however, and claims that “end users have found that the Wi-Fi issue is much more widespread, in addition we are finding that GPS and Bluetooth issues are also a likely result of the same design flaw.”

The petition goes on to say that Asus removed GPS from its spec list, and then announced a new Transformer Prime that eliminated the offending back plate that was causing the problem in the first place.

At this news, people petitioned Asus to either replace the back plate on their current model or let them trade it in for the new model.

Fraser claims the company was aware of the problem and apologized for it in a Facebook post:

The ASUS Transformer Prime is made from a metallic unibody design, so the material may affect the performance of the GPS when receiving signals from satellites. Please note that this product is not a professional GPS device, and signal performance can be easily influenced by factors including, but not limited to: weather, buildings, and surrounding environments. Please understand there are limitations when using the GPS function. To avoid inconveniencing users who demand a powerful GPS device, we made the decision to remove it from our specification sheet and marketing communications. We apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

Fraser then goes on to say that he finally received his Transformer Prime on January 16 and “almost immediately … began to experience significantly reduced GPS performance which rendered the device unreliable and not functional.”

“Upon information and belief, plaintiff’s reception problems relating to the GPS are not unique and individuals across the country have experienced similar problems following their purchase of the Transformer Prime.”

“[T]hese problems are, without question, the result of the Transformer Prime’s defective design and/or manufacture (‘… no RF window …’) and there is no foreseeable manner to remedy the defect on the existing device,” Fraser says.

Fraser seeks an injunction and damages for “negligence, defect in design, manufacture and assembly, breaches of warranty, violations of California’s Consumer Legal Remedies Act and business and professions codes, and negligent misrepresentation.”

Have any of you, the readers, experienced problems with the Transformer Prime? Does this issue warrant a class action lawsuit? Let us know in the comments.

The bill Congress approved not only finances the radar-to-GPS switch, it will also allow for unmanned drone flights in U.S. airspace within the next four years. This, of course, is assuming these flights will be of a non-military nature, because Predator drones are already in use over the United States. As for the radar-to-GPS approval, ABC News provides details:

The bill authorizes $63.4 billion for the Federal Aviation Administration over four years, including about $11 billion toward the air traffic system and its modernization. It accelerates the modernization program by setting a deadline of June 2015 for the FAA to develop new arrival procedures at the nation’s 35 busiest airports so planes can land using the more-precise GPS navigation.

If you want an example of what TRACON-strapped air traffic controllers are currently working with, you can watch the following video from AirBoyd’s YouTube channel. It’s a 38 minute play-by-play of Florida air traffic controllers talking a passenger in after the pilot passed out.

While the story itself is incredibly compelling, the video also gives you a great example of the technology that’s available to the FAA:

Instead of time-consuming, fuel-burning, stair-step descents, planes will be able to glide in more steeply with their engines idling. Planes will also be able to land and take off closer together and more frequently, even in poor weather, because pilots will know the precise location of other aircraft and obstacles on the ground. Fewer planes will be diverted.

The FAA’s goal is to have the GPS system in place in the 35 busiest airports in the U.S., and the bill’s authorization of $63.4 billion over the next four years will clearly facilitate the switch.

The last remaining hurdle for the FAA is President Obama’s signature, signing off on the program; however, considering the current President’s spotty record in relation to NASA, is there a guarantee the bill will get executive approval?