In playing with my fabbo new Motorola Droid there is a free downloadable app called “anti droid theft” that lets me actively track the location of the phone via GPS or cell tower triangulation if GPS is unavailable by going to the anti droid theft website. I just tried it and it works perfectly. The website delivers the mapped address of the phone based on the most recent update. It updates about every 5 minutes.
It occurs to me that this could be used as a bug to track the location of a car or person if you could plant it in their luggage or purse etc. If, say, a suspicious wife installed the tracking app on her husband’s droid is she in any violation of any privacy law or similar statue?
If using it to track someone without their knowledge is illegal, then they don’t mention it on their web site as far as I can tell. At least you would think it would rate a footnote for CYA.
Nitpick: GPS can’t track something on it’s own. GPS tells the device where it is but the device needs a transmitter to be able to broadcast it’s position. This isn’t a GPS issue it’s an issue with devices broadcasting their position.
Use by police is very different than use by just anyone. My non-lawyer guess would be that it wouldn’t be illegal in and of itself, but it might run afoul of anti-stalking laws. So like for example, just looking at someone with a pair of binoculars wouldn’t be illegal, but might be if part of a general campaign of stalking. What exactly the non-stalking application of secretly tracking your spouse with GPS would be is a mystery to me, but still.
As a somewhat on-topic anecdote. I had a former co-worker who’s (new) company used a GPS tracking product like mentioned above to make sure they weren’t goofing off in the company vehicles. My erstwhile colleague discovered that by covering said GPS tracking thing with tinfoil, it wouldn’t work and so would occasionally disable it when he wanted to goof off. The company then secretly put a second one on his vehicle, caught him goofing off and fired him. Granted he probably wasn’t the sort to consult a lawyer, but as far as I know there was nothing improper about what they did and we live in a state with unusually strong privacy protections.
It looks to me like it is legal to use a tracking device on a vehicle you own, but not on other vehicles. Of course, this is a California law, so YMMV depending on the state you are in.
I wonder how the word “transmission” in paragraph (d) is interpreted. An ex-boss of mine bought his son a car and put a device in it to track the speed and location of the car and record it in memory. He could then get it from the car and download the data. Would the downloading be considered a “transmission”. He told his son about it, since the purpose of the device was drive correct behavior, not catch incorrect behavior.