Jackson Parker

• December 20th, 2010
• Jackson Parker

Google Maps has just released two great new features for the Android – GPS System 3D interaction, offline reliability.

Offline Reliability

Mobile Internet connections are never 100% reliable but this is a huge step toward greater offline reliability. These new updates provide a solution to one of the biggest limitations with a mobile GPS system – being able to access and use your navigation GPS system while you are offline, so you can find your way even if you lose your connection. Most GPS system users have all had those frustrating moments when you get stranded without a map – like when you’re driving in the mountains and the cel coverage is limited or anywhere else with an unreliable Internet connection.

According to Google’s blog post, “dynamically drawing maps requires 100 times less data to get maps across all zoom levels, so now we’re able to proactively cache (or store) large areas on your device based on where you use Maps the most. This way, you can rely on having fast, robust maps available to you where you’re most likely to need them.”

• December 6th, 2010
• Jackson Parker

Several important court battles over the use of GPS tracking by law enforcement without a warrant have been going on during the last year. The courts have returned different opinions recently.

1) In November 2010, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, in a five to four split, upheld a lower court’s ruling that law enforcement agencies need to obtain a warrant to use the “global positioning system” (GPS) to track a suspect.

The federal appellate court denied a Department of Justice request for reconsideration of a three-judge panel’s ruling that warrantless GPS tracking violated the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights as well as the defendant’s “reasonable expectation of privacy.”

The case involved a D.C. area nightclub owner who was busted for drug possession after police attached a GPS tracking device to his vehicle. Local authorities had monitored Antoine Jones for a month without a warrant before they nabbed him. In a divided decision the court ruled to re-establish Jones’ 4th amendment rights as precedent over what is essentially probable cause, most likely because there didn’t seem to be probable cause for much of the time spent monitoring the suspect.