Big Brother is tracking you?

Legality of Mobile Phone Tracking Still Unclear Despite Supreme Court GPS Decision:


From www.wired.com:

The Supreme Court’s blockbuster GPS decision Monday afforded American’s new constitutional privacy protections against warrantless government tracking.

But the justices stopped short of clearly spelling out how wide those rights actually are — or when exactly a warrant would be needed.

The case tested whether the police may secretly attach a GPS device to a vehicle and track its every move without a probable-cause warrant. The judges made it clear that the physical act of putting a tracker on the vehicle constituted a search and that police would be wise to get a proper search warrant, even though the justices didn’t outright say they had to.



But police GPS tracking via cloak-and-dagger methods seems almost quaint given how many of us now voluntarily carry tracking devices — aka mobile phones.

So for many of us a more interesting legal question is, does the government need a warrant to track my location in real time via my mobile phone?

The answer to that question has never been fully resolved by the Supreme Court, mostly because the government prefers the legal uncertainty that lets it track Americans when it wants to without having to prove probable cause to a judge. And the high court’s majority decision Monday gave little guidance on how it might rule on the issue, which is meandering in the lower courts.



Photo: SnoShuu/Flickr