In California is it legal to pay someone to secretly install a GPS tracking device on a client’s vehicle & deny it?
I live in California and last week I paid for a used car from a mid-sized used car lot. Eairler this evening they requested I bring the car in for them to take a few photos requested of them by the finance company.
We didn’t make it there until after the sun had set, and offered to bring the car back tomorrow when it was light out. They said that wasn’t necessary and requested the keys to move car to lower level of lot to “photograph” under the shop lights.
While waiting for our car and walking around the uppper sales lot to pass the time, my fiance was able to see our car below and noticed mechanic working under the dash for a solid 10-15 min (no one was taking photos). When we asked about the mechanic we were told he was taking pics, and when we asked if they were installing a GPS in our vehicle, we were told “absolutly not”,.
Knowing that finance companies have been known to install tracking devices in vehicles sold to individuals with crumby credit (for repo purposes) I demanded a straight answer from the salesmen in regards to our car.
After alot of talking in circles we finally pulled a mostly TRUTHFULL answer out of the GM. And “Yes,-Indeed” a GPS tracking device had been installed in our car. Is this legal? From the info I can find online it appears that it is legal, but laws change from state to state.
And if it is legal to secretly track our every move (because we are considered a “risk” with our very less then perfect credit), and then to not disclose this info to us upon our request? Sounds Like a violation of personal privacy rights to me.
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Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway — and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.
That is the bizarre — and scary — rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants — with no need for a search warrant.
(See a TIME photoessay on Cannabis Culture.)
It is a dangerous decision — one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.
This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle’s underside.
After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA’s actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand. (Pineda-Moreno has pleaded guilty conditionally to conspiracy to manufacture marijuana and manufacturing marijuana while appealing the denial of his motion to suppress evidence obtained with the help of GPS.)
In these highly partisan times, GPS monitoring is a subject that has both conservatives and liberals worried. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit’s pro-privacy ruling was unanimous — decided by judges appointed by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.
(Comment on this story.)
Plenty of liberals have objected to this kind of spying, but it is the conservative Chief Judge Kozinski who has done so most passionately. "1984 may have come a bit later than predicted, but it’s here at last," he lamented in his dissent. And invoking Orwell’s totalitarian dystopia where privacy is essentially nonexistent, he warned: "Some day, soon, we may wake up and find we’re living in Oceania."
http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,2013150,00.html?xid=rss-fullnation-yahoo
What do you think about this?
Related Blogs
Government agents can sneak onto your property in the middle of the night, put a GPS device on the bottom of your car and keep track of everywhere you go. This doesn’t violate your Fourth Amendment rights, because you do not have any reasonable expectation of privacy in your own driveway – and no reasonable expectation that the government isn’t tracking your movements.
That is the bizarre – and scary – rule that now applies in California and eight other Western states. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers this vast jurisdiction, recently decided the government can monitor you in this way virtually anytime it wants – with no need for a search warrant.
It is a dangerous decision – one that, as the dissenting judges warned, could turn America into the sort of totalitarian state imagined by George Orwell. It is particularly offensive because the judges added insult to injury with some shocking class bias: the little personal privacy that still exists, the court suggested, should belong mainly to the rich.
This case began in 2007, when Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agents decided to monitor Juan Pineda-Moreno, an Oregon resident who they suspected was growing marijuana. They snuck onto his property in the middle of the night and found his Jeep in his driveway, a few feet from his trailer home. Then they attached a GPS tracking device to the vehicle’s underside.
After Pineda-Moreno challenged the DEA’s actions, a three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled in January that it was all perfectly legal. More disturbingly, a larger group of judges on the circuit, who were subsequently asked to reconsider the ruling, decided this month to let it stand.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/time/08599201315000
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I am looking at buying a GPS tracking device. Here is one that I found that sounds kind of good: http://cgi.ebay.com/Mini-Realtime-GPS-GSM-GPRS-Personal-Tracker-Tracking_W0QQitemZ170404863554QQcmdZViewItemQQptZGPS_Devices?hash=item27acebde42
I don’t understand the way this works. It says to insert a SIM card into the unit. Does that mean that you have to have a phone number assigned to it? The other method, which would be better for me, instead of having to call it everytime, is through GPRS. I don’t know what that is, how it works, how to set it up, or if it costs something.
Ideally, I would like something that you can put in a vehicle, that transmits to a computer constantly, showing how long a vehicle is stopped where ever it is stopped at as well. One that takes a SD card that I could swap out would be awesome, too!! Any ideas on an inexpensive model that would work this way? It needs to have a very long battery life, too.
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