Is Your Cell Phone Listening in on You?

Time asks

Is Your Cell Phone Listening in on You?.

"The federal Wiretap Act makes it illegal to intercept communications and intentionally disclose or use them. That law seems to be the perfect avenue for thwarting the companies that surreptitiously collect information from smartphones. But the Wiretap Act also contains a major loophole. Courts have held that if only one party consents to the wiretapping, then it’s legal. So if your wireless carrier says that it’s okay for a marketing company to collect and transmit your personal information, your consent is not required. Laws pending in Congress deal only with narrow slices of the problem by placing limits on monitoring of phones’ GPS data (Senate bills 1212 and 1223) or expanding the Federal Trade Commission’s power to go after data aggregators that surreptitiously collect personal information about people (Senate bill 913). But even if piecemeal laws were passed, there’s no guarantee that judges would give sufficient weight to digital privacy in interpreting them. In 2010, a New York judge likened digital communications (in that case, an email) to “postcards” that anyone could see — thus gutting privacy protections altogether."