That's a problem, advocates say, because the law is now completely outdated. The law currently gives more protection to data you store locally and less to data kept in the cloud - an obvious problem in the age of Gmail, Facebook and Amazon Web Services.

Technology companies and privacy advocates have been calling for Congress to update the legislation for years (see Coalition of Tech Companies Wants to Give You Digital Due Process). The law leaves consumers unprotected, they argue, and dampens the cloud computing sector's economic prospects.

As the law stands, providers can do little to assure users that their data will remain protected if someone in law enforcement or government wants to look at it. In many cases, law enforcement can compel providers to disclose information without a search warrant.

Google recently disclosed that it had received 3,580 requests for user data from U.S. law enforcement in the second half of 2009. The number of requests Google rose to 4,287 in the first half of 2010.

An urgent need

"Prompt action by Congress to strengthen federal laws safeguarding the privacy of information stored in the cloud is growing more important by the day as Americans become ever more reliant on cloud computing in all aspects of life," a group of advocates wrote in a statement submitted to House Committee on the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties during its hearing on ECPA today.

In the absence of laws guaranteeing the protection of data in the cloud, some providers are letting users store encrypted data without handing over the key. Encryption is less desirable because it eliminates the advertising subsidy for some services (Gmail ads wouldn't work if emails were encrypted), adds the cost of encrypting the data and can slows services down. "In many ways, therefore, ECPA's failure to protect our digital communications and documents amounts to a "tax" on Americans," the group wrote.

The group proposed that law enforcement must obtain a search warrant from a judge based on probable cause in order to have access to digital data and communications.

Google, Microsoft back reform

The reform is backed by a number of high-profile companies including Google, Microsoft and AT&T as well as the American Civil Liberties Union.

Microsoft lawyer Brad Smith had an especially good line during today's hearing. "E-mail in someone's in-box should not be subject to a different standard than e-mail in your sent-box," Smith said. "The reality today is that ECPA increasingly falls short of a common-sense test."

[photo via Brynn_Avon]

Below you'll find information about that hearing and five other top stories from the past 24 hours around the web on geolocation, selected with assistance from OneSpot.

We've requested the list of hearing witnesses from the committee and will update this post when we find out who will be speaking.

Best Practices Already Being Hashed Out

One likely suspect is Loopt, a very popular location based social network that transmits passive location data to a user's chosen network of friends and allows them to push selected location updates out into public networks like Facebook and Twitter. Loopt CEO Sam Altman says he doesn't know if anyone from his company is speaking at the hearing but that Loopt team members have testified before Congress about user privacy before and found it quite productive. Brian R. Knapp, Chief Privacy Officer and General Counsel at Loopt, says he's been helping people from some other companies prepare for the hearing next week.

Altman says Loopt keeps a close eye out for abuse cases and has instituted warning systems like algorithmic monitoring of user behavior, SMS messages to make sure users know they are tracking their location and postal mail sent to the homes of children who sign in. Altman says Loopt participated extensively in the writing of the CTIA best practices document for user location data.

Does Altman think the location based economy needs some regulation? "I come up on the Libertarian side of government regulation," he told us, "but it's bad for everyone if someone is playing fast and loose with location data and something bad happens. Regulation may be too strong a word but we need some understanding industry-wide about how to respect privacy and keep people safe."

While many location apps are based on explicit "check-ins" by users and others ask users to opt-in to allowing a service to know their location so that location-features may be leveraged, Altman believes that ongoing, passive location tracking will become more common in the future.

"When passive location becomes mainstream," he told us, "and I think it will because there are so many upsides, over the next 6 months it's going to become more important that everyone do it the right way."

Location as a platform and the privacy challenges therein are going to be hot topics this year. Stick with ReadWriteWeb for ongoing coverage.

In other location news today...

MWC: Smaato Eyes Geo-Ad Markets Outside US
GPS BUSINESS NEWS

"Activity in the location-based advertising market is growing rapidly and not just in North America. That's according to Ramy Yared, managing director of adsmobi, the newly-established media buying arm of mobile advertising firm Smaato...A recent report from JP Morgan's analyst Imran Kahn forecast that mobile advertising is set to grow 45% to USD3.8 billion in 2010."

TomTom posts solid Q4 results
GPS BUSINESS NEWS

"TomTom today announced its financial results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2009. During the fourth quarter 2009 the revenue of the Dutch company was €533 million, up one percent against the previous year...TomTom also gave guidance for 2010: 'We expect broadly flat revenue and earnings per share in 2010 compared with 2009', adding that 'we made our assumptions bearing in mind that free turn-by-turn navigation on some smartphone platforms will be available in our major markets.'"

Ski gloves now record your GPS coordinates
GPS Obsessed

"Austria's Zanier have announced a ski glove model with integrated GPS. Dubbed the X-Plore.XGX, the gloves help you follow a route or get back to your car along with recording important ski-related info such as altitude, speed and distance."

ESRI Announces Relationship with Amazon Web Services
GIS and Science

"As part of its commitment to support cloud computing, ESRI is collaborating with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to join the growing community of AWS Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) building services and solutions in the cloud computing environment."

Waze Partners with Intermap: European Bbasemap + Mobile Community
GPS BUSINESS NEWS

"Geospatial content provider Intermap and user-generated maps and real-time traffic start-up Waze have entered into an agreement where Intermap will supply its European road basemap to Waze and Waze will provide Intermap with live data, consisting of anonymous GPS points - latitude, longitude, and height measurements - sourced from its user's community. " Intermap provides geometric datasets and focuses on topography.

Black-hat hackers got into an unnamed website hosted on Amazon's servers then proceeded to install an illegal command and control infrastructure. Named America's number one most wanted botnet, Zeus was discovered on Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) by security researchers yesterday.

Although we don't yet have details on exactly how the website in question was hacked, we have learned that the software has been removed from the Amazon cloud. This incident is the first example of malware being found on AWS' infrastructure.

As we were warned by black hats in April this year, cloud computing carries certain risks and opportunities for exploitation. Our own Sarah Perez wrote:

In another part of the Sensepost presentation, they looked specifically at vulnerabilities of Amazon's Web Services. To start off, they detailed the process involved in setting up a new instance on EC2... While Amazon has provided 47 machine images they built themselves, the remaining 2721 images were build by other EC2 users. Can you really believe that all of these images were built securely? Basically, the template directory is just a big archive of user-generated content. And you know what user-gen content is like... risky.

As John Pescatore told the Financial Times, "The security of these cloud-based infrastructure services is like Windows in 1999. It's being widely used and nothing tremendously bad has happened yet. But it's just in early stages of getting exposed to the Internet, and you know bad things are coming."

Will hackers continue to employ web services to carry out their schemes in 2010? Twitter, Facebook, Google Apps, and now Amazon Web Services have all been used for evil this year. How can websites, corporations, and end users be smarter about online security to avoid personal and financial loss next year? Let us know what you think in the comments.

In a world of online fraud and flaky customer service, the prospect of having Amazon handle payment collection for apps sounds great to us.

A number of companies have been beta testing Amazon DevPay, from cloud monitoring service Hyperic to photo sales app SmugMug.

DevPay charges 30 cents per transaction plus %3 of costs to customers beyond the cost of the Amazon Web Services charged to developers.

On Windowshop.com, you can either use your mouse or the arrow keys (the keyboard works better) to scroll through a wall of Amazon.com content which includes both best-sellers and new releases in Books, Music, Video, and Games categories. After you zoom in on an item, a preview will play. For an album, that preview is just a snippet of a song; for an audiobook, it's a snippet of the narrator reading the content; for video content like movies, TV shows, and games, you'll see a video clip displayed instead.

The content is sorted into different scrollable columns with column labels at the top describing the items below. There are columns with both the best-sellers and new items for each category, but there are also Editor's Picks and "Best-Selling of All Time" categories, too. As new content is added to the site every Tuesday, the older content is moved to the right, which keeps the Windowshop.com product list in chronological order.

Cooliris Should Be Flattered

The Windowshop site is so much like a Cooliris-enabled web page, that it had us scanning for a "powered by Cooliris" logo somewhere on the site. The scrolling, zoomable wall of content is very similar to what the Cooliris plugin provides. It seems the entire site has been inspired by the technology if it doesn't, in fact, actually use it to power the virtual "windowshopping" itself.

It's interesting that this site was created only a few months after Amazon.com became Cooliris-enabled themselves, with their own Amazon category underneath the Discover/Shopping feature within the Cooliris browser. There, you can scroll through several other categories of content like Home & Garden, Baby, Electronics, the Kindle Store, and more. You can also sort the content displayed by price, popularity, or relevance. The Cooliris wall also has a nifty 3D effect when scrolled, where the Windowshop.com wall stays very much 2D.

Still, the Winodwshop site is another good alternative to visually browsing the best from Amazon.com, even if it is just a tribute to Cooliris's technology. You know what they say about imitation...

We've seen more of these types of visual browsing technologies pop-up this year, from ManagedQ's semantic Google-based search to Photo Stream's visual newsroom and, more recently, to new search engines like Viewzi and SearchMe. We wonder: will 2008 be remembered as the year visual search took off?

Windows in the Cloud

Given how many companies rely on Windows servers to run their business, adding support for this operating system makes good sense for Amazon. The pricing for these Windows services, however, is considerably higher than that for running Linux instances on EC2.

As Mary Jo Foley notes, Amazon will also attend Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference next week, which is interesting, given that Microsoft is also expected to unveil its own cloud computing platform at this conference.

Amazon will continue to offer the pricing under the "pay what you use" model where there is no minimum fee or long term equipment required.

According to Alyssa Henry, general manager of the Amazon Simple Storage Service, ""The growth of Amazon Web Services has allowed us to become even more efficient and further lower our operating expenses. AWS remains committed to passing savings along to our customers. Just six months ago, we announced a reduction in data transfer costs, and today we're pleased to pass new storage savings along to our customers."

But it's clear that this pricing change is more than a simple "pass the savings on to you" move by the company. Since the company formerly had a flat pricing plan, the new tiered pricing and volume discounts makes it clear that Amazon is looking to edge out their competition. The service now also looks more appealing to the enterprise who may have felt that, before, there was not enough of a savings to use cloud storage as opposed to host-your-own storage behind the firewall.

The new pricing goes into effect November 1st, 2008.

Just like Amazon's S3 and E2 shook up the market for online storage and cloud computing, this new CDN solution will surely drive down the prices for content delivery. At first, however, Amazon's new service will not support streaming video or live broadcasts. Because of this, Akamai and Limelight don't have to fear the competition with Amazon just yet, but we would be surprised if Amazon did not add more video specific features to its CDN in the future.

Preemptive Move

Interestingly, as Om Malik points out, New-York based Voxel just announced a CDN solution based on S3. Amazon rarely pre-announces new services, so we definitely agree that this announcement today should be seen as a preemptive move by Amazon.

Project Management in DreamFactory

With the availability of DreamFactory on QuickBase, the suite is now available on four different cloudware platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Salesforce App Exchange, WebEx, and now QuickBase. The company is now working on making DreamFactory available on Google App Engine, too.

The Amazon S3 dashboard by Sisense is a pre-configured custom analytic dashboard. It connects with your Amazon hosted web service to provide better visuals of your service's statistics. Sisense utilizes the Amazon S3 log files to provide developers with a more visual view of their stats. You can view your data in tabular format, receive charts, review data from specified periods of time, and receive information with "Key Performance Indicators".

Future Plans and Concerns

Thus far, the company offers services for Excel, MS SQL, MySQL, CSV, OLAP, and Oracle. Versions for Google spreadsheets, and Adwords are on Sisense's roadmap for the near future. While the product is great and more than useful for developers, the biggest concern for Sisense and similar cloud based services is whether these services are sustainable if the cloud computing platforms they cater too ever shut down.

Update: We have 50 invites available for Sisense. If you'd like to try Sisense simply use "S3!W435zar@50" as the invite code.

Each of the DreamTeam Suite's components offer features that put them on par with other similar web apps and desktop software products. The Project Management module, for example, does Gantt charts and resource management, and the Document Collaboration piece allows for sharing, messaging, and version control. A new homepage for the suite lets you see an overview of all the activity of your current projects and allows for one-click workspace creation as well.

DreamTeam's Project Management Module

As for the pricing, DreamTeam is much more affordable than some of its competition - for comparison purposes, Basecamp starts at $24/month and goes up to $149/month, but to get unlimited projects in Basecamp, you must pay the $149/month rate. With DreamTeam however, the money the company saves on infrastructure is passed on to their customers.

For anyone in need of a business suite that's a bit easier on the wallet, DreamTeam should be added to your list. There's a free trial available from the company's homepage, if you want to try out the suite for yourself.

"Increasingly, we see that organizations of all sizes are putting AWS to use in new, innovative, and mission-critical ways," wrote Amazon Web Services Evangelist Jeff Barr in a blog post. "These organizations have told us that they need a more direct and more discreet way to request assistance and to report problems."

The new services don't come particularly cheap, costing $100 per month or $0.10 per dollar of total monthly usage for silver level (whichever is greater), or the greater of $400 per month or $0.10-$0.20 per dollar of total monthly usage for gold level.

Amazon is also beefing up support options for free customers with the release of the new AWS Service Hearth Dashboard that monitors the status of all AWS services. Amazon says that during outages, users can expect to see updates from the team every 15-30 minutes until things are fixed. Status updates can be accessed via the page or by RSS.

If Amazon really wants to upgrade their free support center, we suggest they build something off the excellent Get Satisfaction service, which just released an API yesterday. Some of Amazon's web services already have a page on Get Satisfaction, but the company has yet to send over any official support reps.

In that respect Google App Engine is more like the so-called "Platform-as-a-Service" (PaaS) apps like Bungee Labs, which we profiled firstly in April 2007 and then more recently in February when it launched a new version. Other PaaS contenders include Salesforce.com's Force.com platform (nicely summarised by Dan Farber) and Morfik's Ajax platform.

Google App Engine launches as a closed Beta, with 10,000 developers granted access on a first come, first serve basis. It's free, but during the preview period applications are "limited to 500MB of storage, 200M megacycles of CPU per day, and 10GB bandwidth per day." It has a good set of initial features, which Google's Matt Cutts summarizes well:

"You can store your data in a Google Bigtable using the Google File System (GFS). There’s a bunch of App Engine APIs to simplify things like sending email and fetching urls. Your application can authenticate users that are using Google Accounts, so you can avoid the whole “ask your users to create a new account” issue if you want."

So it's a good start and you can imagine that this is just the beginning, as anyone who has read Nicholas Carr's excellent book The Big Switch will realise. Computing infrastructure is rapidly turning into a utility and Google App Engine is yet another example of this.

Why Would a Startup Want to Use Google App Engine?

There are many compelling reasons for startups to use Google App Engine; and Alex Iskold summed them up in his post Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds. Alex explained why the likes of Amazon, and now Google, are providing a valuable service to startups:

"We are witnessing a fundamental shift in our ability to compute and this is just the beginning. Amazon is at the forefront of making massively parallel, web scale compute services available to the world. Free from the need to solve the scalability problems, startups are able to focus on the specific problems that their product or service is trying to solve. All of this is happening while the cost of hardware, bandwidth and services overall keep dropping."
(emphasis mine)

However, there are a few downsides to the Google approach. For one thing, it means developers must use Python as their programming language - PHP and Ruby are two other popular languages today. But looking at the bigger picture, startups which use Google App Engine are essentially tying themselves into Google's technology. They'll need to host with Google, do their processing with Google, store their data with Google, etc. And as some people have already speculated, having a web app built and deployed with Google App Engine makes it much easier for Google to eventually acquire that web app.

It does make you wonder: would you want Google to control your entire end-to-end development environment? Isn't that what developers used to be afraid of Microsoft for?