GPS laws — Updating Needed

Court rules that sly GPS tracking isn’t unlawful

by Darren Murph, posted Feb 4th 2007 at 6:40PM

It’s one thing to offload (illegally) a dozen or so GPS units from a storage facility and beg the police to nab you by leaving them turned on, but for the boys in blue to slide a tracking device into your ride to keep dibs on your doings, well that’s another matter entirely. Earlier this month, the Seventh Circuit of the US Court of Appeals "ruled against a defendant who claimed that the surreptitious placement of a GPS tracking device amounted to an unconstitutional search," essentially giving the coppers the green light to add a GPS module to a suspicious ride sans a warrant. While we’re sure the privacy advocates out there are screaming bloody murder, the district judge found that they had had a "reasonable suspicion that the defendant was engaged in criminal activity," and it seems that a well-placed hunch is all they need for lawful placement. Interestingly, the government argues that no warrant was needed since "there was no search or seizure within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment," but did add that "wholesale surveillance of the entire population" was to be viewed differently. So while this may come as a shock to some folks out there, it’s not like your vehicles have been entirely devoid of data capturing devices up until now anyway, so here’s fair warning to be on your best behavior when rolling about. There’s more excellent discussion on legalities of GPS Tracking on Engadget.

Often the general news media hue and cry about GPS and privacy issues is so lopsided or ignorant I don’t even bother to read it or post about it.

In general,

• If you own a vehicle you can track it
• If folks work for you, you can track them with their prior consent
• If you’re a parent, you can track your child
• If you carry a cell phone it is subject to tracking, GPS or not

Those four generalization however don’t begin to track the surface of GPS …. I should say  … tracking law.  I am at heart a person who believes that in many ways we already have too many damn laws.  But I can’t deny that in the case of rapidly expanding new technology we need new laws … or significant clarification of old ones.  Let’s take one example from my bullets above.  Parent tracking child.  If, by child, we mean a natural offspring under 18 years of age, although I am not a lawyer, I think you can safely say that you can track that person, with or without their consent, in any of the 50 states.  Whether or not you should track without consent is another story for another day (I think not), but I don’t think one of your own children could successfully bring suit against you for doing so.

What about a stepchild, though, as in the story the article references?  Wanna make a bet?  I sure don’t.  Although in many cases the law would consider your rights the same as a natural parent there are dozens or hundreds of other factors that might enter in.  What does the child’s natural parent think?  How old is the child?  on and on. 

Now let’s say you have some vehicles in your business.  You place tracking devices on them and use the information you gather to help you run your business.  So far I think you’re on safe ground anywhere.  But one day you find some egregious employee misconduct by an individual, you fire him, based on what you "see" him doing via the GPS records.  He files a wrongful termination suit.  Does he have a chance?  Again, something I wouldn’t make a bet on because the law is so silent on this matter it’s like a vacuum.

You give an employee a company-owned laptop.  You take care to insure that there is no GPS device attached to it because you specifically want to avoid the tracking issue.  Now the employee downloads a free software like Loki and sends his location back to the office unintentionally, proving he’s in Fenway watching the Sox when he swore he was going down to Providence that afternoon to see a client without fail.  Can you fire him based on knowing his location without his knowledge, even if he was the person who installed the technology? (I’ve written about this non-GPS location technology here).  Among other things it does this:

Location-Based Search and ‘Virtual GPS’

Loki pinpoints your exact physical location and then uses that location to make the web revolve around you wherever you are. With Loki you’ll always know where you are, make sure that others know where you are too, never get lost and always be able to find stuff nearby.

The law should tell us what we can’t do, and by default then we can do what the law doesn’t speak to us, but we can’t take proper advantage of GPS and wireless technology with today’s deafening silence.  GPS is in the forefront on this issue but there are other common tracking technologies, in particular cell phones (even those without GPS) and wireless IP tracking technology.