Think GPS Invades Your Privacy? You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet!

Speed trap? Or something much more insidious? This police officer seems to be striking a pose familiar to many, many drivers. Is he aiming a radar gun at passing traffic looking for the guy going 10 or 15 miles over so he can issue a ticket and meet his monthly quota? (Sorry, made a mistake there, in my city they emphatically have no quotas; they have “Monthly Performance Standards” … makes one feel a lot better about getting a ticket.) But annoying as a traffic ticket may be, there’s an already well-advanced police activity out there today … not next decade … that could be one heck of a lot more troublesome than a couple more points on your license. I’m writing about this today because in my field, GPS tracking technology, invasion of privacy is one of the prime issues on many people’s minds. Folks, especially rabid privacy advocates, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

… In recent years, police around the country have started to use powerful infrared cameras to read plates and catch carjackers and ticket scofflaws. But the technology will soon migrate into the private sector, and morph into a tool for tracking individual motorists’ movements, says former policeman Andy Bucholz, who’s on the board of Virginia-based G2 Tactics, a manufacturer of the technology.

Bucholz, who designed some of the first mobile license plate reading, or LPR, equipment, gave a presentation at the 2006 National Institute of Justice conference here last week laying out a vision of the future in which LPR does everything from helping insurance companies find missing cars to letting retail chains chart customer migrations. It could also let a nosy citizen with enough cash find out if the mayor is having an affair, he says… Rest of Wired News article here:

I thought this was pretty interesting, to say the least. The criticisms of GPS tracking technology center around the fact that it is invasive, may give people a lot of problems for the tiniest lapses that are only human nature, and may divulge information to parties who never were envisioned by the folks who originally set out to collect the data.

Certainly all of these objections have some substance and are worthy of discussion. As a GPS tracking advocate I counter that there are safeguards which can mitigate the issues. In general the court system has pretty much sided with me.

The general rule for law enforcement is that they can use GPS tracking technology, with little or no probable cause, because GPS tracking is, essentially, only an electronic way of replicating a law enforcement officer following a suspect to observe behavior. In most cases, a private citizen would not have the right to place tracking technology on another citizen’s car … although, in general, it’s not illegal to follow and observe another’s activities on public thoroughfares.

In Japan there is a massive, “secret” government system that tracks individual cars by license plate using cameras (that also measure speed and issue speeding tickets) , toll booth cameras and other information I can’t verify. In Great Britain a national system of camera tracking license plates (soon to be enhanced by embedding RFI chips in plates) is well underway.

But this hasn’t worried me too much. Although I enjoyed my years in Japan, they don’t care for me living there, so it’s unlikely I’ll be back often enough for the national tracking system to affect me. I lived in the UK also, but with prices what they are there and the brown liquid that is allowed to be sold and labeled beer, it’s doubtful I’ll be under the Queen’s supervision again. I naively passed over the idea of a national tracking system here in the US … mainly because no one, even the department of Homeland Security (especially the DHS) can make any national plans, much less implement them. Part of the ordinary citizen’s safeguard is that law enforcement is so fragmented, political and (sadly in some cases) incompetent at any true form of coordination.

But this little device is like a patrol officer on more steroids than Jason Giambi. Thousands of license plates per second. Huge volumes of information on the movements of every single citizen within its field of view. No real laws or legal guidelines involving its use.  It’s a given that an officer can stand on a street corner and observe who is passing … and even physically note the license numbers of passing cars. It’s then almost a non-argument that s/he could also use a conventional camera to photograph those cars. Certainly even the ALCU wouldn’t take up a case to then prohibit using a video camera to take movies of passing traffic … it’s already done by hundred’s of thousands of traffic cams. So what stops an officer from recording and databasing each and every license plate that passes?  She doesn’t need to put a GPS or RFID device on anyone’s car, he or she just collects, collects, and collects. Why?  “Can’t comment, sir, its police business.”

I don’t know about your state, but here in Colorado, although as a private citizen I can’t obtain information on a fellow motorist, it’s an open secret that all sorts of motor vehicle information is readily sold to commercial sources … I just re-titled my car and you should see the pile of junk mail that generated. So whose is going to stop state or local agencies from selling the addresses of people passing certain locations? Or a list of all attendees at a movie theater, or a list of locations your license plate was observed at over the past month.

Don’t totally know what to make of this technology … but I can tell you for certain if GPS makes you nervous or even angry regarding privacy? This is an issue that will knock your socks off.