Recently, the United States Supreme Court heard argument on the case of United States v. Jones. At issue is the legality of the Washington, D.C. police surreptitiously – and without a warrant – placing a GPS tracking device on a suspect’s car, and then using information taken from the GPS to convict him of drug trafficking. Nearly all of the judges expressed their concern with the government’s position, but the questioning by certain justices was particularly pointed. Concerned that a decision in favor of the police could facilitate a rise of the machines, Justice Alito posited: “With computers, it’s now so simple to amass an enormous amount of information about people that consists of things that could have been observed on the streets,” suggesting that the surveillance state envisioned in George Orwell’s classic cautionary tale 1984 could indeed become reality if the Court decided this case without distinguishing between being tracked via GPS and being tailed on the sidewalk. The government, on the other hand, argued that cars traveling on public roadways do not have the same Fourth Amendment privacy protections afforded citizens in their home and placing a GPS device on the car to track those same movements is not a “trespass” under the Fourth Amendment.
The implication of using GPS devices for tracking people does not simply include someone suspected of engaging in criminal activities. Reports have recently emerged that OnStar reserved the right to track and sell information about a vehicle’s location and speed even after the driver cancelled service by altering their Terms and Conditions with their customers. OnStar, a division of General Motors, provides a variety of services to vehicles including driving directions and vehicle diagnostics. Concerns about potential abuse of this information – tracking consumer location and speed – fueled privacy advocates and prompted quick responses from OnStar and General Motors to soften the public outcry. Interestingly enough, this is the same type of data and information that the government is seeking to collect in the Jones case. The collection of this information by a private corporation creates even more concerns for the Federal Trade Commission, and, more importantly, the general public.
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