As Malte Spitz showed us in his TED piece, your cell phone on your nightstand dutifully reported your location.

FORBES: While You Slept Last Night... Big Data, Privacy and the Public Square

For the government, a warrant isn't currently required after a certain period of time for older information -- e-mail, social networking profiles or cell-phone location data -- stored "in the cloud" on Web servers.

CNN: 5 big tech issues await Obama in second term

Siminoff is now adding demographic and location-based variables and looking at a move into advertising on cell phones.

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Of course, given that we all carry around our own personal digital trackers these days in the form of cell and smartphones, privacy and civil liberties advocates are already moving on to the next big location legal question: should the government need a warrant to get access to the whereabouts of your phone (and thus you)?

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This will be useful because the location and activity of receptor proteins on surface membranes can be a matter of life and death for a cell or a virus.

ECONOMIST: Microscopy