Senators Ask Google, Apple, RIM to Remove DUI-Checkpoint Avoidance Apps

U.S. Senators Harry Reid (D-NV), Charles E. Schumer (D-NY), Frank Lautenberg (D-NJ), and Tom Udall (D-NM) are co-signers on a letter to Apple, Google, and RIM, in which they ask the companies to remove any apps from their respective marketplaces that allow users get around DUI checkpoints.

We know that your companies share our desire to end the scourge of drunk driving and we therefore would ask you to remove these applications from your store unless they are altered to remove the DUI/DWI checkpoint functionality.

One application contains a database of DUI checkpoints updated in real-time. Another application, with more than 10 million users, also allows users to alert each other to DUI checkpoints in real time.

A quick search on the App Store shows several such apps. One is .Tipsy., free, and another is Fuzz Alert Pro, a 99 cent app.

A similar app in the Android Market is PhantomALERT, which is a free app that also covers speed traps as well as DUI checkpoints.

In addition to these types of apps there are crowd-sourced apps like Trapster (which spans platforms) that help avoid speed traps and police checkpoints in general.

The open letter was published on March 22. It was sent to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, Scott Forstall, Apple's Senior Vice President, iPhone Software, and James L. Balsillie and Michael Lazaridis, the co-CEO's of RIM.