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A broad coalition of companies including Google, Microsoft, and AT&T, joined by liberal and conservative advocacy groups, will announce a major push Tuesday to update federal privacy laws to protect mobile and cloud computing users, CNET has learned. They hope to convince the U.S. Congress to update a 1986 law--written in the pre-Internet era of telephone modems and the black-and-white Macintosh Plus--to sweep in location privacy and documents stored on the Web through services like Google Docs, Flickr, and Picasa.
That law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, or ECPA, is notoriously convoluted and difficult even for judges to follow. The coalition hopes to simplify the wording while requiring police to obtain a search warrant to access private communications and the locations of mobile devices--which is not always the case today.
