According to the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has issued a report saying cell phones are not causing accidents, but is "the full spectrum of things that distract." The IIHS (funded by a group of car insurers) compared crash data between states that had instituted cell phone bans and those that hadn't. According to its research, while the ban had reduced phone use, it hadn't helped reduce crash rates.
The National Transportation Safety Board has presented several studies linking cell phone use to an increased chance of crashing and their latest proposals would ban not only cell phone usage, but most hands-free systems found in major car makers' vehicles today.
The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) voted on Tuesday to recommend that all states ban the use of using cell phones while driving, whether for talking or texting. It is also recommending that states ban hands-free devices, which are typically used as a safety measure among those who do place phone calls while driving. “No call, no text, no update is worth a human life,” NTSB chairman Deborah Hersan said. “This is a difficult recommendation, but it’s the right recommendation and it’s time.” States are not required to follow the NTSB’s recommendation, The New York Times said, noting that state regulators can individually choose to implement a law or ignore the recommendation altogether.
Speaking during a recent UBS conference in New York City, Verizon Communications CEO Lowell McAdam said that Verizon Wireless may rollout shared data plans next year. Currently, a family of five must have a different data plan for each member of the household; however, the new plans could potentially allow all five family members to share a pool of data, much like a family would share voice minutes. The same benefits could apply to a single customer who has separate data plans for a tablet, a smartphone and a USB modem. “I think in 2012 we will see it,” McAdam said. “We have been working on this for a couple of years. Getting to one bill and getting to account-level pricing is our goal.”
Carrier IQ provides telemetry to cellular carriers and manufacturers, and according to the company itself, its software is preinstalled on over 141 million phones. Now, a security researcher, Trevor Eckhart, claims that the same software is monitoring every single key you press on your smartphone, reading your SMS, and logging much of the personal data you transmit, too — all with an app that you can't remove.
Eckhart accused the company's software of monitoring vast swathes of user personal data and phoning home to the likes of Verizon, Sprint, Samsung, HTC, Nokia, and more, has posted alleged video evidence of his claims on YouTube. Originally, Carrier IQ sent Eckhart a cease-and-desist letter, then withdrew and apologized for the threat, all the while representing that the service it provides cell phone manufacturers and carriers did not "record your keystrokes" or "inspect or report on the content of your communications, such as the content of emails and SMSs."
Contrary to what Carrier IQ states, Eckhart has posted a video of the software doing just that on a HTC EVO 3D phone. Eckhart's video allegedly shows Carrier IQ's software reading incoming SMS messages even before the phone displays them to you, querying supposedly encrypted HTTPS strings, and logging keypresses, all using an application that the user cannot opt-out of, stop, or remove. The video does not show if the data is transmitted or not however.
So far Verizon and Nokia have denied the software exists on their phones and while the software can be found in Apple's iOS, it appears it is only active in debugging mode. [Verge]
We reported earlier that the Promenade Temecula in southern California and Short Pump Town Center in Richmond, Va., launched a survey on Black Friday, tracking shoppers' movements by monitoring the signals from their cell phones. The original plan was for those malls to continue the survey through New Year's Day, but after receiving a phone call from Sen. Charles Schumer's office over the weekend, they put the survey on hold.
The technology used antennas set up around the shopping centers to anonymously track shoppers as they moved from store to store. Customers were notified of the survey via small signs, and the only way for them to opt out was to turn their phones off.
In a press conference on Sunday, Sen. Charles Schumer said the malls should have given shoppers the choice to opt-in.
"A shopper's personal cell phone should not be used by a third party as a tracking device by retailers who are seeking to determine holiday shopping patterns," the New York senator said in a statement. "Personal cell phones are just that -- personal. If retailers want to tap into your phone to see what your shopping patterns are, they can ask you for your permission to do so."
While the Cleveland-based mall management company, Forest City Commercial Management confirmed that it tracked shopper data on Black Friday, it said it now plans to pursue an easier opt-out option for consumers.
"We have temporarily suspended further trial of the technology while we work with the system developer on possible enhancements, and in deference to concerns raised by Senator Schumer," the company said. "We look forward to meeting with the senator and his staff, together with the system developer, to further explore his concerns."
There is no link between cell phone use and an increase risk in cancer, the largest study on the topic to date has concluded. The results were published on Friday in the medical journal BMJ. Scientists from the Institute of Cancer Epidemiology, Danish Cancer Society and the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC) studied Danish citizens between 1990 and 2007 and divided them into groups of cell phone users and non-cell phone users. A total of 358,403 cell phone users participated and the results were applied to an earlier study that was completed between 1982 and 1995.
“We observed no overall increased risk of tumors of the central nervous system for all cancers combined associated with the use of mobile phones,” the study said. The researchers did admit there could be a risk for a select amount of users and that further research would be useful. “As a small to moderate increase in risk for subgroups of heavy users or after even longer induction periods than 10-15 years cannot be ruled out, however, further studies with large study populations, where the potential for misclassifications of exposure and selection bias is minimized, are warranted,” the researchers said.
A World Health Organization report published in May of last year suggested that radio frequency electromagnetic fields emitted by cell phones are “possibly carcinogenic to humans based on an increased risk for glioma, a malignant type of brain cancer associated with wireless use.” That report was quickly shot down by multiple researchers. Another study published in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, which involved 1,000 participants, also concluded there is no link between cell phone use and increased cancer rates. Similar findings were published in The Economist and in Environmental Health Perspectives.
California Gov. Jerry Brown is vetoing legislation requiring police to obtain a court warrant to search the mobile phones of suspects at the time of any arrest. The Sunday veto means that when police arrest anybody in the Golden State, they may search that person’s mobile phone — which in the digital age likely means the contents of persons’ e-mail, call records, text messages, photos, banking activity, cloud-storage services, and even where the phone has traveled.
California's Assembly passed the bill 70 - 0 and the state Senate 32 - 4. The bill’s sponsor, Sen. Mark Leno (D-San Francisco), was flummoxed by Brown’s action. “It was a curious veto message suggesting that the courts could resolve this more effectively than the state Legislature,” he said in a telephone interview.
