Wireless carriers urged the FCC to proceed with caution as it considers rules requiring better location accuracy for 911 calls coming from wireless devices indoors. The carriers, responding to a Sept. 9 FCC public notice, said they have a good track record of trying to make call location as accurate as possible. An FCC workshop on the topic is slated for Wednesday. Public safety groups want the FCC to take more steps to require better indoor reliability for wireless calls to 911 (CD Sept 26 p19).

Telematics won’t be a major revenue generator for SiriusXM until 2017, as it builds on its recent Agero connected-services acquisition and automakers start deploying those services more broadly, CEO Jim Meyer said Thursday at the Goldman Sachs investor conference in New York.

DENVER -- The connected device market is at a “transition point,” said Nest Labs CEO Tony Fadell during a Q-and-A session following his Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association Expo keynote speech Wednesday. “The old brands you have known are not necessarily the brands you are going to be installing in the next two or three years,” Fadell predicted, citing a “major sea change” that’s occurring in the cloud-based, app-driven world.

Changes may be needed to generate users’ trust in apps, said Jacob Kohnstamm, chairman of the executive committee of the Conference of Data Protection and Privacy Officers and chairman of the Dutch Data Protection Authority, at the data protection officers conference this week. “We don’t want to spoil the fun with apps,” said Kohnstamm, but data protection officers agreed to work with app developers to make them aware that “privacy should be taken into account."

FCC Commissioner Ajit Pai will vote against an NPRM seeking comment on eliminating the UHF discount on TV station ownership at the commission’s open meeting Thursday, a spokesman for his office told us. The item will likely still be approved on the strength of votes from Commissioner Jessica Rosenworcel and acting Chairwoman Mignon Clyburn, said an FCC official. Neither commissioner’s office commented.

EAGLE-Net will be able to complete its middle mile network by December 2014, said project representatives at Colorado Legislative Audit Committee hearing Wednesday. Through August, 2,938 miles of broadband network infrastructure were completed and 105 community anchor institutions were connected through EAGLE-Net. Mike Ryan, the project’s CEO, said the company was able in April to solve its disputes with NTIA over modifications to its routes, and the project is on track to connect schools across the state. EAGLE-Net said it will complete the project using the remaining $8.4 million of its NTIA grant and $8 million from a new network provider.

The FCC is set up to take up at its Thursday open meeting proposed rules requiring wireless carriers to make public a list of towers that are taken out of service during emergencies, though the item could still be pulled from the agenda. The NPRM was first circulated this summer, with CTIA asking instead that the commission issue a notice of inquiry preliminary to proposing rules (CD Aug 1 p2). The NPRM from the Public Safety Bureau is separate from the commission’s pending follow-up order on superstorm Sandy-related 911 call center outages. Consumers Union originally requested that the FCC require carriers to publish tower outage data.

Release of a preliminary version of the National Institute of Standards and Technology-facilitated Cybersecurity Framework will “inevitably” be delayed if an overall government shutdown occurs, said White House Cybersecurity Coordinator Michael Daniel at a Billington cybersecurity conference Wednesday. A shutdown could occur Oct. 1 if Congress and President Barack Obama can’t agree on a continuing budget resolution. A shutdown would furlough all but essential federal employees, including NIST staff working to finalize the preliminary framework, Daniel said. Obama’s cybersecurity executive order requires NIST to release the preliminary framework for public comment by Oct. 10 (CD Feb 14 p1). Delay of the preliminary framework’s release would be one of the many “bad things” to result from a government shutdown, but “ultimately we'll get there and get it published,” Daniel said. The cybersecurity summit also touched repeatedly on fallout from the leaks of information on the National Security Agency’s controversial surveillance tactics.

There’s a future for the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) if the Senate can pass a comparable bill, said House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers, R-Mich., who authored the measure. Though his bill has not gained traction in the upper chamber, if Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., can pass a companion bill, the two could work out a deal, Rogers said on a Tuesday panel at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “If we can get anything close to that, anything, we'll get it in conference committee and Senator Feinstein and I will work it out, I'm convinced of it,” he said. “We've just got to get it to the next place."

Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller, D-W.Va., is expanding his investigation into the ways data brokers collect and pass on personal information they gather from surveys, sweepstakes and questionnaires, he said in a Wednesday news release. He said he sent letters this week to 12 popular personal finance, health and family focused websites that “may collect detailed or sensitive information about a consumer’s health or financial status.” Privacy advocates said the letters should spur more regulatory action from Congress, the FTC and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. Representatives of those agencies had no comment on the timeline for further regulatory action.