Some More "Expert" Opinion On Tracking Legalities

One of the places you seldom find me hanging about and certainly almost never find me commenting are on the “ultra cool” gadget sites like Wired. These guys are very good at what they do, covering the newest and most timely news on new web developments, software (they’ll have months and months of trivia to peddle with Microsoft’s at long last launch of Vista) and tend to write with a certain edginess or “snarkiness” that appeals to the introverted 20 something who still live in daddy’s basement, on daddy’s credit card and bitch about the “establishment”.

I have nothing against the snarky part, writing with a little edge tends to keep people awake. Goodness knows my writing probably bores a lot of people, so I really am not singling them out from any feelings of “sour grapes”.

But this is the second time in as many days that I’ve seen a big, well funded and theoretically “authoritative” site posting articles on GPS tracking as if they understood. I don’t try to tell people what’s “hot” with the XBox or other trendy items because I respect my readers enough to stick to my areas of knowledge. Would that the “Wired”’s of the world have the same respect.

Now the article that got my6 attention is here. It’s a not badly written piece that describes yet another in the long string of legal findings that establishes that police do not need a search warrant to place a GPS tracking device on the outside surfaces of a suspect’s car. Defense attorneys, of course have been milking this for years now, just because you’re client is guilty as sin and you know you’re going to loose is certainly no reason not to pile on another thousand billable hours on the 4th Amendment issue.

At the very end of the article though, the contributor of the post, who clearly has been napping for the past few years since he feels the judge rendered some sort of unique legal decision here can’t resist throwing in a snide comment that calls the judge’s competence into question by remarking that the court seemed to think, in their opinion, that one could track vehicles using a GPS and Google Earth.

Well I hate to wake you up from your long nap, Mr. Beschizza, but I’ve sold or issued contracts to buy hundreds and hundreds of GPS trackers that can be tracked on Google Earth. Matter of fact I’ve mentioned several times in the past few days how the ready availability and high level of detail available in Google earth and its web-based subset, Google Maps is opening the floodgates for a whole new generation of GPS tracking opportunities. See here and here, for example. There’s life here in the old boy yet, I guess.