U.S. Supreme Court Unanimously Decides Warrant Needed by Police for GPS Tracking

The Wall Street Journal reported that the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled today that police must obtain a search warrant prior to before attaching a global positioning system (GPS) device to a suspect's car. According to the Journal, "The government argued that attaching the tiny device to a car's undercarriage was too trivial a violation of property rights to matter." Also according to the Journal, "The decision upholds a federal appeals court in Washington, which voided a drug conviction because police obtained evidence by using the GPS tracker to follow the suspect's movements without a valid warrant."

According to the New York Times, "That ruling avoided many difficult questions, including how to treat information gathered from devices installed by the manufacturer and how to treat information held by third parties like cellphone companies." The Times also reported that, "Though the ruling was limited to physical intrusions, the opinions in the case collectively suggested that a majority of the justices are prepared to apply broad Fourth Amendment privacy principles unrelated to such intrusions to an array of modern technologies, including video surveillance in public places, automatic toll collection systems on highways, devices that allow motorists to signal for roadside assistance and records kept by online merchants."

Writing in a majority opinion and reported by the Times, Justice Antonin Scalia said, "We hold that the government’s installation of a G.P.S. device on a target’s vehicle, and its use of that device to monitor the vehicle’s movements, constitutes a ‘search.'"

Amazon Tracking and Location Prediction Patent Granted

The patent was made public last week. It's was applied for in 2007 and is titled, "System and method for providing advertisement based on mobile device travel patterns." It's wierd the abstract mis-expands GPS:

Mobile device users may be tracked either via mobile-signal triangulation or via Global Positioning Satellite information. A mobile device user's recent movements may be analyzed to determine trails or traffic patterns for device user among various locations. Mobile device trail information, either for an individual user or aggregated for multiple users, may be analyzed to determine a next destination for the user. Electronic advertising content, such as advertisements, coupons and/or other communications, associated with the next destination may be sent to an electronic device likely to be viewed by the mobile device user. Additionally, the identity of the mobile device user may be known and the advertisements or coupons may be tailored according to demographic information regarding the mobile device user. In addition, destinations may be recommended to mobile device users based on the recent locations the users have visited.

CBS News breaks down the claims and speculation is this may be the future of the Kindle/Kindle Fire.

CBS News via SlashGeo

GIS Among Safest (economy-wise) in UK and other International GIS News

The safest areas are likely to be software design and development, GIS jobs, networking and systems administration, software implementation analysis and database administration.

That's the word from Peter Sondegaard, head of research at IT research and advisory company Gartner predicts cloud services in EMEA (Europe, the Middle East and Africa). He told a recent analysts' European conference in Spain last week about the state of IT.

- Leader Live

A Jewish group in Jerusalem is using 21st-century technology to map every tombstone in the ancient cemetery on the Mount of Olives, a sprawling, politically sensitive necropolis of 150,000 graves stretching back three millennia.

The goal is to photograph every grave, map it digitally, record every name, and make the information available online. That is supposed to allow visitors to find their way in the cemetery, long a bewildering jumble of crumbling gravestones and rubble surrounded by Arab neighborhoods in east Jerusalem. Beset for many years by neglect, it is among the oldest cemeteries in continuous use in the world.

- AP

All bus operators in Taiwan will be required to install a geographic information system (GIS) in all their vehicles by the end of 2012 following the passage of an amendment to transport industry regulations, the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (MOTC) announced Thursday.

The goal is to let passengers know when the bus is coming. I like this announcement because normally it'd say GPS and ignore any use of GIS. Sadly, I'll bet the goal was really to cite GPS.

- Focus Taiwan

Addressing the first ever WikiConferencein India, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales here Friday said the representation of maps on the free encyclopedia was in accordance with the ideas of its readers and editors and the founders were not the only ones to control the content. 

As Wales spoke at Mumbai University's Fort campus, some Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM) members staged a protest outside the campus, contending there was an "illegal" depiction of India's map on Wikipedia. 

- India Times

Maturation of Marathon Tracking Solutions

The first time I ran the Boston Marathon the athlete tracking was so bad my nephew decided I had dropped out and he and his family went home instead of seeing me come by. That was 2006.

The past weekend I sat in my living room watching the New York City Marathon live on TV while tracking five friends running the event on a slick app on the race website. Not only did we get close to real time updates of peoples times at various points, there was also a map withe each of them represented by a different icon on a Google Map. One of my friends watching with me had bought the mobile app and was getting updates just about the same time as I got them on the computer (my app was free to use). Our first runner accross, in a substantial personal record was at 3:02. Go Sanjay!

The only glitch seemed to be with one of our slower runners - it took her a long time to show up as even on the course and she disappeared a few times, leading (again) some to believe she'd dropped out. That was not the case. 

These systems, even at these huge races, which huge numbers of people tracking multiple athletes, have come a long way. Another, who works at Akamai, suggested that company may have something to do with the system staying up.

Finding Your Library in Suffolk County and other Government GIS News

In Suffolk County, NY, library budget allocations are tied to library card registrations, so it is important that residents (a) register and (b) do it in the right library. However, in Suffolk County, point "b" is not always so straightforward, because a library's service area is defined by school districts, township boundaries, and other confusing lines.

So, a federal libaray grant was used to develop a site to help people find their library and apply for a card. I'm so glad my city has a single library system (with three branches).

- Libaray Journal

Plows will have TomTom GPS devices, just like those sold in stores, programmed with each of the 217 snow plow routes, meaning all drivers will have to do is punch in the specific route number and just follow the voice commands. 

Keith Compton, the head of the county's [Montgomery County, MD] snow removal team, says the 300 or so TomToms were far less expensive than the automated vehicle locator system they contemplated buying: "These things are about $250 a piece. A full-blown AVL system is about $800,000."

- WAMU

The Data.Illinois.gov site will soon post more than 4,000 additional sets of data. Currently there are just several hundred sets.

The Illinois governor's office says it recently received federal government approval to post the new data that offers information related to Illinois compiled by several U.S. agencies.

Among the data are those from Census and EPA.

- WBEZ via @storm7