August 2013

In a recent paper, William and Mary Law School Professor Adam Gershowitz discusses situations where police arrest someone and would like to search their phone for more evidence. Under the Fourth Amendment, cops can search a person’s pockets and open containers such as a briefcase, but not closed locations (unless it’s an emergency). Courts, however, disagree on whether a phone (and its contact list, call logs, pictures and so on) is like a briefcase or more like a locked container that requires special permission to search.

Gershowitz noted that some police departments are using a device called the “Universal Forensic Extraction Device,” which can suck up the entire contents of a cell phone in less than 90 seconds so investigators may examine a copy of the contents later on. He adds, however, that the devices are too expensive to provide to every single cop and, that civil liberties groups like ACLU have challenged their legality. Poorer police departments can simply buy a roll of aluminum foil for $2 in a grocery store and leave it in their vehicle. When the police seize a phone, they simply have to wrap the phone in a few layers of aluminum foil and the chance of remote wiping of the phone will be almost completely eliminated.

A coalition of consumer health organizations is calling on federal health information technology policymakers to live up to the congressional mandate that the federal electronic health-record incentive payment program should address health disparities.

The coalition -- formed in 2005 and whose members include unions, the AARP, ACLU, and numerous other advocacy groups -- is led by the not-for-profit National Partnership for Women & Families, which has had a representative on the Health Information Technology (HIT) Policy Committee since its inception in 2009. The action plan contains a 31-page appendix linking its recommendations to add to or amend, by rule number, existing Stage 2 and proposed Stage 3 meaningful-use criteria. The report noted that Stage 1 meaningful-use criteria for federal EHR incentive payments—and the soon-to-be activated Stage 2 criteria—“require providers to record a patient's demographic information and to generate at least one list of patients by specific condition” to target for the alleviation of disparities. “However, there is no requirement to view lists of patients by disparity variables such as race, ethnicity, language, gender identity, sexual orientation, socio-economic or disability status. Moreover, neither stage requires anything more to explicitly identify report, address and reduce health disparities,” the report said. Mark Savage, director of health IT policy and programs at the partnership, said within the HIT Policy Committee there is “a generalized acknowledgement” of the need to further address health disparities.

Remember when Facebook admitted it wasn't making a penny off its mobile users? Just one year after finally launching mobile ads, the company is on track to capture nearly 16% of the market in 2013.

That's triple the global mobile ad market share Facebook controlled last year, according to eMarketer, a firm that publishes research on digital marketing. In a report, eMarketer said Facebook is taking the market by storm and far outperforming the firm's earlier estimates. Facebook's accomplishment is even more striking when taking into account that the social network's mobile ads raked in exactly $0 in 2011 -- that is, they didn't exist. Facebook admitted shortly after its May 2012 initial public offering that it wasn't making "any meaningful revenue" from mobile. The company didn't start showing mobile ads until August 2012.

Google announced that it will integrate traffic data from Waze into its Google Maps app on iOS and Android. As Google is already a market leader for navigation technology, the consolidation of Google Maps and Waze's GPS software could potentially be anti-competitive. The UK’s Office of Fair Trading (OFT) is now checking whether the deal qualifies for a full investigation under the Enterprise Act in the UK.