Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey said on Monday that he had drafted a bill requiring device makers and others to inform consumers of what software is installed or added to their phones.

The move comes after last year’s uproar surrounding Carrier IQ software installed on various devices on behalf of cellular providers.

“Consumers have the right to know and to say no to the presence of software on their mobile devices that can collect and transmit their personal and sensitive information,” Markey said in a statement.

A number of carriers and device makers have backed away from supporting or using Carrier IQ, including Apple and Sprint. Carrier IQ has also defended its practices.

As drafted, the bill would require consumers to be notified when they buy a device about what monitoring software is installed; and to be told if the device maker, carrier or operating-system provider later installs such software, or if a downloaded app also includes tracking software.

Consumers would be told what type of information is collected, how it will be used and to whom it is provided. Cellphone owners would have to give consent, and any parties getting the information would be required to have policies in place to protect the information.

I’ve sent notes to the major carriers, device makers and mobile operating system vendors to see if they have anything to say about the new bill. A representative of the CTIA, a cellphone industry trade association, said the group had no position or comment.

The GPS shoes have a tracking device implanted in the right sole, with a GSM/CDMA antenna snaking up behind the heel so that the GPS signal is not blocked by the body; the shoe also includes a USB port, primarily for charging the product’s battery.

Made by footwear company Aetrex, with GPS technology provided by GTX Corp., the shoes cost $299.99, with the added monthly cost of a tracking plan. Caretakers can opt to have the wearer’s location recorded every 10 minutes for $39.99 a month, or every 30 minutes for $35.99 a month.

Customers can visit the Aetrex Web site to purchase the shoes, set up an account for the shoes through GTX Corp. and, using Google Maps, create a “geo-fence” encompassing what’s considered a safe distance around a wearer’s house or living community. The caretaker can opt to have messages sent via email or receive simple SMS text messages on a cellphone when the wearer wanders outside of the geo-fence.

The caretaker can then access the online portal to find the wearer’s location on a Google Map. There’s also an emergency backup system the caretaker can call for additional help; that requires the caretaker to share the GPS information with the emergency-care provider.

Aetrex began planning and designing the GPS shoes two years ago; the product was certified by the Federal Communications Commission in September of last year and began shipping in late December. Only a few hundred pairs have sold so far, but Aetrex president Evan Schwartz said the companies have done little marketing at this point, and have been focused instead on a strategic rollout of the shoes.

Schwartz also said the company will begin shipping to Canada and other countries soon, and that Aetrex and GTX have struck a deal with an international SIM card provider to make the tech available internationally.

For now, Aetrex and GTX are selling the shoes directly to consumers, but they have been in talks with the Alzheimer’s Association and the Veterans Benefits Association to explore partnerships for marketing the shoes to assisted-living communities and geriatrics departments.

While the GPS shoes could give caregivers some peace of mind if a family member is prone to wandering, the concept of trackable clothing could raise questions from both a technical and legal standpoint.

Aetrex says the battery life of the shoes lasts two days on average, but the shoes would be rendered ineffective if a caretaker wasn’t around to charge them, or the wearer forgot to do so. Also, if the person monitoring the shoe-wearer opts in for more frequent pings, the battery will die more quickly. Aetrex says the GPS shoe system does send email or text notifications to remind the caretaker when the battery is getting low.

There’s also the possibility, of course, that the wearer could remove the shoes, or simply refuse to wear them.

When someone purchases the GPS shoes and goes to activate the online monitoring system, he or she has to sign off that they are a designated caregiver, and that they have the authority to monitor the wearer of the shoes and make those kinds of decisions for the wearer. But, as with many of the technologies we have at our fingertips, there is always the possibility of misuse.

A recent Supreme Court case involving law enforcement officials’ use of GPS to track a drug-trafficking suspect has also raised some questions about the rights civilians have when it comes tracking others using GPS technology (our Wall Street Journal/SmartMoney colleagues did a good rundown of some instances where it can be done legally). Stories like these indicate that we’re still in the early stages of setting privacy standards when it comes to digital tracking.

“It’s all kinds of good and bad and ugly popping up when it comes to GPS tech these days, and that’s definitely a concern,” Schwartz said. “There are enough people who make jokes about tracking a spouse, or what if you threw the shoe in the trunk of someone’s car and they never know it’s being used for that, that sort of thing.”

“But at the same time,” he added, “this shoe has been designed to serve a purpose, and it’s to help caregivers, so we have a hard time believing someone would abuse this.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article said the GPA shoes support CDMA technology. The shoes do not support CDMA; the antennae in the shoes are GSM/GPS.

Andy Smith, CEO of IAC-owned DailyBurn, says that the benefit of fitness-tracking tools goes away after the first few weeks, and users ultimately fall into the same activity — or inactivity — patterns as before.

“They do help a small subset of people,” Smith said. “You find that there are type-A personalities that like to track everything, and that’s great. For others, it might give them a little jump start. But the value proposition of those devices after the first few weeks goes way down.”

DailyBurn is a fitness-data-tracking company that is now focusing on fitness content. The company pivoted partly because data-tracking wasn’t all that effective, Smith said.

Last week, Nike introduced a $150 lightweight wristband with a tri-axis accelerometer for gauging activity levels; earlier this week, Fitbit — maker of the popular Fitbit device — announced that it had raised $12 million in Series C funding to continue making fitness products.

Nike’s FuelBand just became available for preorder, so it’s too early to tell how enthusiastic consumers are about that particular device. And while it’s unclear how many Fitbit units have sold since it hit the market in 2009, the newer Fitbit Ultra is listed as one of the top 50 products in the health-and-fitness section on Amazon.com.

Another wearable fitness device, the Jawbone UP, is currently in production limbo as the company deals with technical and hardware issues, but the wristband was initially received with excitement from some consumers.

“I feel like these are not quite a gimmick, but are close to it,” Smith told AllThingsD. “You get people to spend $100 to $150 bucks on something that’s just a glorified accelerometer — which, by the way, you have in your phone, too.”

“I think people know when they’re not active,” Smith added. “They know if they didn’t move around enough today. I don’t buy it.”

Smith’s opinion is informed by the fact that DailyBurn used to be more data-oriented, but has since shifted its strategy become more content-focused, he said.

DailyBurn first launched in 2008 under the name Gyminee. Back then, the company was tailored more toward fitness data tracking and the sharing of data through social networks to help users meet their weight loss goals.

In May 2010, the company was acquired by IAC. At the time, the company claimed 500,000 members; Smith said it has around two million users now.

Following the acquisition, DailyBurn introduced the DailyBurn Tracker app, as well as food-tracking app Meal Snap, an attempt to spur weight loss motivation by giving caloric estimates based on photos of food.

Ultimately, Smith said, constant tracking isn’t necessarily the best way to facilitate that.

With DailyBurn’s newest fitness product — a personalized Web video program that streams over smartphones and the iPad to users’ TV sets — the company is focused on getting people to exercise four to six times a week, for 30 minutes a day, at a good level of intensity. It’s not something you buy that’s a quick fix, Smith said.

Readers, what are your thoughts? Are health-and-fitness tracking devices useful or useless?

It’s not entirely clear how the company will use the information. But it could mean that when users search via Google, the company will use their activities on sister sites like Gmail and YouTube to influence those users’ search results. Google hasn’t done that before.

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For more than a year, federal prosecutors have argued in U.S. District Court that the use of the stingray device — which can locate a mobile phone even when it’s not being used to make a call — wasn’t a search, in part because the user had no reasonable expectation of privacy while using Verizon Wireless cellphone service. Under that argument, authorities wouldn’t need to obtain a search warrant before using one of the devices.

The defendant in the case, Daniel David Rigmaiden, is facing fraud charges. His quest to force the government to provide information about the device used to locate him was the subject of front-page article in The Wall Street Journal in September.

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In July, the largest daily deals company sent an email to subscribers, saying it was changing the way it would use mobile location information. The same month, a congressman wrote to Groupon CEO Andrew Mason asking for more information regarding its data collection techniques, Reuters reports.

At the time, Groupon explained to users: “If you use a Groupon mobile app and you allow sharing through your device, Groupon may collect geo-location information from the device and use it for marketing deals to you.”

AllThingsD’s Kara Swisher wrote at the time: “In other words, if you let them, in order to improve the experience and make the Groupon app more useful, you’re being tracked.”

This was about the same time that Apple and Google got into hot water for tracking users on the phone, ostensibly in order to improve location-based services.

Groupon has become accountable for its actions not only because of the size of its business but also because of its announced intention to raise $750 million in a public offering.

In a response to the congressional questions, Groupon’s general counsel David Schellhase explained that the company is developing technology that will track customers’ locations, even if they don’t have the Groupon app open on their phones.

The letter was written to the co-chairmen of the House Bipartisan Privacy Caucus — Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, and Edward Markey, a Massachusetts Democrat — who made it publicly available today, according to Reuters.

Today, Groupon offers a service called Now that offers deals — based on a user’s location — that can be redeemed immediately. But in order to find the offers, you have to remember to open the app and search for discounts manually.

Schellhase argued in the letter that customers are asking for services, such as push notifications, that would make the process more automatic.

In the letter, Schellhase explained that if it were able to track a user’s location at all times, Groupon could send a notification to the phone that would appear around lunchtime and alert that person to an offer for a nearby restaurant.

“In order to choose a relevant deal for the user at the correct time, location information would need to be collected about the user just before noon, even if the Groupon mobile application is not running on the device at that time,” he explained.

Schellhase added that customers would have to sign up for the service, otherwise Groupon would not collect the data.

The new techniques, which are legal, reach beyond the traditional “cookie,” a small file that Web sites routinely install on users’ computers to help track their activities online. Hulu and MSN were installing files known as “supercookies,” which are capable of re-creating users’ profiles after people deleted regular cookies, according to researchers at Stanford University and University of California at Berkeley.

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While there has been a report on a boxing news site that Yahoo Americas head Ross Levinsohn was leaving the Internet giant to run HBO’s sports unit, it’s not so.

Trust BoomTown on this one–I have all top Yahoo execs embedded with Apple iOS and Google Android location tracking devices.

Apparently, calling to ask about such a big move is tough one-two for BoxingScene.com, but Yahoo confirmed the non-departure and Levinsohn did too in a brief phone conversation.

“I’m not leaving,” he said.

The Apple iOS and Google Android smartphone location-tracking kerfuffle. Smarty-pants commentators. KQED’s “Forum” radio show with interviewer Michael Krasny yesterday.

Go!

Madigan said in a statement that she had sent a letter to both companies asking them to detail exactly what information their devices are collecting, how long the information is stored and for what purposes.

“I want to know whether consumers have been informed of what is being tracked and stored by Apple and Google and whether those tracking and storage features can be disabled,” Madigan said in a statement. “It’s important that these companies ensure that their users’ private information is protected.”

Madigan is among the latest to raise questions over how the companies are dealing with location-based information following articles last week noting that, since the release of iOS 4, Apple devices have been keeping a detailed database of everywhere that iPhones and 3G-equipped iPads have been, storing the information in an unencrypted file.

The Wall Street Journal also noted that certain location-based information is also being sent to Apple and Google from their devices. In a separate story on Sunday night, the Journal noted that the iPhone appears to be storing the data whether or not users opt in to location-based services.

According to Bloomberg, the South Korean government is also looking into Apple’s data practices, and the first consumer lawsuits have appeared, filed in Florida.

Apple has declined to comment on its practices, including how much information is sent to the company, how long it is kept, how it is used and why the information is stored in an unencrypted file. However, its CEO reportedly responded to one customer’s mail with a terse comment. “We don’t track anyone. The info circulating around is false,” Jobs said in the email, as reported by MacRumors. Apple has declined to say whether the email is indeed from Jobs, though he is known to fire off short responses on occasion to customers who email him.

Google declined comment on Madigan’s letter, but defended its practices last week, noting that it collects information only from users who opt to receive location-based services such as custom search and mapping. The company has said the information collected is tied to a unique identifier that is specific to each Android device, but is not tied to other personal information, such as a Google ID.

“Our view is that that’s an industry discussion,” Erich Andersen, deputy general counsel for Microsoft, told Digits. “We’re trying to take a leadership role in helping users send a signal of their intention. But the key thing is that a definition of ‘tracking’ needs to happen.” Microsoft Advertising serves ads based on users’ browsing behavior as well as on Bing searches and sites like MSN.

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Lawrence E. Strickling, an assistant secretary of commerce, is expected to call for the legislation at a hearing of the Senate Commerce Committee, said a person familiar with the matter.

This person said the administration will back a law that follows the outlines of a report issued by the Commerce Department in December. The administration wants any new rules to be enforceable and will look to expand the Federal Trade Commission’s authority, this person said.

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Microsoft’s decision to include the tool in Internet Explorer 9 means Google Inc. and Apple Inc. are the only big providers of browsers that haven’t yet declared their support for a do-no-track system in their products. In January, Mozilla Corp. said it would include a do-not-track feature in an upcoming version of its Firefox browser. Internet Explorer is the most widely used browser.

The moves by Microsoft and Mozilla reflect an unusually fast adoption of an idea—the do-not-track system—that was first officially proposed by the Federal Trade Commission only three months ago. It highlights the pressure the industry faces to provide people with a way to control how they are tracked and targeted online, as lawmakers and regulators threaten to rein in the practice.

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Data-gathering firms and technology companies are aggressively matching people’s TV-viewing behavior with other personal data—in some cases, prescription-drug records obtained from insurers—and using it to help advertisers buy ads targeted to shows watched by certain kinds of people.

At the same time, cable and satellite companies are testing and deploying new systems designed to show households highly targeted ads.

The goal: emulate the sophisticated tracking widely used on people’s personal computers with new technology that reaches the living room.

One of the most advanced companies, Cablevision Systems Corp., has rolled out a system that can show entirely different commercials, in real time, to different households tuned to the same program. It can deliver targeted ads to all the company’s three million subscribers concentrated in New York, Connecticut and New Jersey.

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Companies including Microsoft Corp., McAfee Inc.—and even some online-tracking companies themselves—are rolling out new ways to protect users from having their movements monitored online. Some are going further and starting to pay people a commission every time their personal details are used by marketing companies.

“Data is a new form of currency,” says Shane Green, chief executive of a Washington start-up, Personal Inc., which has raised $7.6 million for a business that aims to help people profit from providing their personal information to advertisers.

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Many of the major location-based social networks launched in early 2009, including Latitude. But Latitude was different: Instead of asking users to manually check in, it continuously displayed their locations on a map in real time. The specificity of that information meant Latitude was primarily used for location-sharing with close friends and family.

Due in part to Google’s heft, the service is relatively popular; now available on all the big smartphone platforms, it has 10 million users who participate each month, compared with six million registered users for Foursquare.

Still, in the past year, just about every local-social pundit and competitor has announced a desire to go “beyond the check-in.” In that context, Latitude’s move to catch up seems oddly timed.

Ken Norton, senior PM for Latitude, justified today’s change by saying Latitude users have been asking for check-ins. Plus (and this is no small thing), Google is associating check-ins with its Google Places project, which means Latitude now has a business model: Connecting its users to local merchants.

Google is not facilitating Latitude-specific deals yet (as companies like Facebook and Foursquare already do), but Norton said there’s nothing stopping merchants from giving a discount to people who check in frequently.

What’s different about Latitude’s version of check-ins? There are a few innovative tweaks that some users may prefer. Google will automatically detect when users are stationary in a place it considers a business, and send them a notification asking if they want to check in.

Also, (with user permission) Latitude supports automatic check-ins for common venues, as well as supporting “checking out” of a place when the users’ location indicates they’ve left the building.

However, users cannot add locations; so, for instance, they can’t check into their homes (unless their homes are already businesses with Place pages).

And while Latitude is hopping on the trend, how about a sprinkle of gamification! Based on their participation, users can qualify to be a “Regular,” “VIP” or “Guru” of a specific establishment. However, there is no leaderboard or public acknowledgment of such users, yet.

Users can publish their locations to their public-facing Google Profile, if they want to share beyond their Latitude friend network. It’s expected that Google will increasingly include these public profiles in new social product launches.

The capability to check in on Latitude is only available on Android to start (through the new Google Maps 5.1 app), but should be coming to the BlackBerry, Symbian and iPhone, said Norton.

Among other things, the new code asks workers to ensure that consumers have a means to opt out of tracking and that privacy policies provide a clear explanation of data collection and usage.

The effort, backed by a group called the Web Analytics Association, aims to provide a professional code for people who work in an important segment of the data industry. Web analysts generally help sites evaluate the traffic coming to their own pages. Such services are typically separate from ad networks, but there are no rules governing the sharing of such data.

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This research paper was produced by two social-computing researchers at HP Labs: Bernardo Huberman and Sitaram Asur. It’s titled “Predicting the Future With Social Media” [PDF here], and it looks at Twitter as a means of predicting the box-office success of newly release films based on the number of people tweeting about them and the sentiments contained in those tweets.

They argued that Twitter was a far better predictor of box-office success than the motion picture industry’s “tracking” reports that studios have used for years. In fact, the two researchers said at the time that Twitter could predict with nearly 98 percent accuracy whether a movie would be a hit or a flop in its first weekend of release. For the study, they mined nearly three million tweets referring to 24 different movies over a time period of three months.

Fflick does some sentiment analysis of its own, but uses that data to help Twitter users decide whether they are going to buy a ticket to a movie based on whether their Twitter friends liked it. Could it be that Google wants to mine that same sentiment data to help movie studios predict box-office sales?

As I said, this is only a theory–one that I admit I’m stretching to the max. I can’t find any connection between the two researchers and Ffflick’s four founders, or its investors, which includes the Founders Fund, though there needn’t be one for my theory to be close to the mark. Fflick was started in August of last year, about five months after the paper was published. And the paper itself was widely covered at the time, in particular by the Los Angeles Times.

Since neither Google nor Fflick is commenting on this deal, which is supposedly still pending, I thought it was worth suggesting as a possible motivation on Google’s part.

Electronista thinks it may have something to do with forecasting popularity on Google’s forthcoming YouTube movie project and the need to predict.

I did check in with the paper’s principal author, Huberman, by email to ask what he thought. His reply: “Sentiment analysis of tweets is great for marketing studies and Google wants to go there since they have search going on with Twitter.” Time will tell if this is what Google has on its mind.

The move is a response to a call by the Federal Trade Commission for a “do not track” mechanism to let users decide not to allow advertising cookies to track their online movements for the purposes of personalizing the ads they see on the Web.

The Keep My Opt-Outs add-on installs easily enough in Chrome, though a few people who have installed it are complaining of problems with the Chrome browser in comments on the add-on’s Web site.

Given Chrome’s relatively small share of the browser market, on its face this is a marginal move. Google however says there will be more to come. It wants to make its add-on available for other browsers and will share the code with the rest of the world on an open-source basis.

The announcement makes Firefox the first Web browser to heed the Federal Trade Commission’s call for the development of a do-not-track system. The Wall Street Journal reported in December that Mozilla was exploring the development of such a system.

For Firefox’s tool to work, however, tracking companies would need to agree to not monitor users who enable the do-not-track feature. So far, no companies have publicly agreed to participate in the system, but Mozilla urged them to join in.

“Mozilla recognizes the chicken and egg problem,” the company’s newly appointed global privacy and public-policy leader, Alexander Fowler, wrote in a blog post. But, he wrote, Mozilla is asking that websites and advertisers join its efforts to “honor people’s privacy choices.”

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In any case, there is a cottage industry developing for products that help those who want to stop texting and yammering on their phones, but need some help.

In the latest such move, T-Mobile plans to start offering a program for Android phones called DriveSmart Plus that allows subscribers who opt-in to have their phones automatically tell when the user is driving and put the phone into a driving mode that disables most texting and calling features. Calls can be set to go straight to voicemail, and a text message can be sent to people who are calling or texting to let them know that the recipient is driving.

Of course, all of this requires users to opt-in, so it will only help those who recognize that they have a problem and actually want to do something about it. And there are ways to override it, which is useful if there is an emergency or the cellphone user is a passenger in a moving car.

But, hey, it is a start. T-Mobile will offer DriveSmart Plus initially only for one phone–the LG Optimus T–but said it plans to expand the service soon. DriveSmart Basic, a free version of the app, is available for free on some T-Mobile phones, although that app requires users to tell the app when they are driving. DriveSmart Plus, the new premium program, will cost $4.99 per month and covers all lines on a subscriber’s account.

DriveSmart Plus is from a venture-backed start-up called Location Labs. T-Mobile is also launching another Location Labs-developed service, dubbed FamilyWhere, for tracking children or family members via their cellphones. It’s apparently useful for monitoring an elderly family member or keeping tabs on school-age kids (or perhaps tracking that cheating spouse, if they are foolish enough to opt-in to the service).