Worried About Privacy and Tracking? Better Not Cast All Your Stones At GPS!

I’m not always so thrifty (or is that lazy?) that I get two blog posts out of one news article, but I thought the excerpt above was interesting.

Many, including this scribe, have posted for and against the issues involved in tracking people’s on road behavior. However, regardless of one’s viewpoint on the good or evil of GPS, better take a closer look around at the various means police and other interested parties have in tracking the where abouts of people without their knowledge.

We’ve written here several times in the past discussing the fact that seems to escape many media commentators and privacy advocates; that any cellular phone can routinely be tracked without any involvement with GPS, typically by triangulating the phone’s constant ‘keep alive’ signals to surrounding cell sites. The phone merely needs to be turned on, it need not even send or receive a call. thus wiretapping laws and other impediments to surveillance appear not to even apply.

Another way the general public is open to unknown and non-court ordered tracking is brought up in the article I referenced in the header of this blog post. Wireless toll collection services and truck port of entry wireless services. A great many readers of this little column already have a transponder on their cars for such services as Ez-Toll. It’s a great boon to mankind to be able to set up an account and then breeze through toll booths.

But bear this in mind …. every car or truck going through that booth is registering the owner’s name, rank and serial number as well as a definitive, court-defensible precise time of travel. Perhaps many privacy advocates aren’t aware of this, certainly there are no precise legal safeguards in place like the procedures that allow (or dis-allow) law enforcement to tap one’s telephone.

On the commercial side of the house, each state has multiple truck weigh scales or “ports of entry” set up to regulate commercial vehicles (and bring in tax dollars for the individual states). A majority of trucking companies today are using systems such as ‘Pre-Pass’, which, by means of wirelss sensors over the roadway, records the date and precise time of passage of trucks subscribing to the service. This eliminates the need for the truck to stop and insures that the sate gets their fees. Seems like a win-win situation. But what privacy advocates haven’t begun to investigate are the safegaurds in place behind that system. Does a state lor local law enforcement official need a court ordser for those records, or do they get them just by asking? Can an ordinary citizen access those records? Opelly? Serupticiously? Or, perhaps, even for a fee?

Lastly, who is looking into interaction of these systems. On my persoanl vehcile I have a toll transponder for the E-470 toll road here in Colorado. On a recent trip to Florida and back, this supposedly passive device, supposedly unique to the toll road entity who furnished it to me, audibly interacted with a number of Pre-Pass wireless sites associated with various state ports of entry. Was information intechanged? If so, what? Who now holds that data? Who owns it? And, who has access to it?

I’m not posting this to be an alarmist, merely to show that throwing bicks at my favorite technology, GPS and GPS tracking, is not the whole answer in the privacy equation. GPS could be turned off tomorrow and a lot of agencies and perhaps individuals could still be happily tracking many of on on our daily drives, walks or bike rides.