By Greg Bartlett

Using the Global Positioning System for tracking assets is not new; however tracking people seems to be the next tech-fad. As the size of tracking devices continue to shrink in size, it is ever more likely that you could be “tracked” completely without your consent.

Recently, one trend in GPS tracking has been to “catch cheating spouses.” This can be scary. If someone was cheating, the spouse would have a right to know. Some may feel that if you have that much doubt concerning the fidelity of your spouse then you should confront them personally.

There are three different types of GPS trackers. The first, data loggers have internal memory and record their location at pre-determined intervals. Then there are data pushers and data pullers. Data pushers send the location of the device to a centralized database at set increments (1 hour, 5 minutes, etc), while to extract the information from a data puller the monitoring personnel must send a query to the device. Data pullers can be sent information requests as often as is necessary. All three categories of devices work by triangulating their position based on the position of three orbiting satellites. As such they require a clear line of sight to the satellites and lose efficiency when underground or in cement parking structures.

The devices available commercially are becoming small enough to fit on a keychain and could easily be secreted into a briefcase to keep tabs on a wayward partner. The moral and legal aspects of such behavior have been questioned. There is no reason that it has to be a spouse that tracks the movements of the other spouse. As news reports of stalking become commonplace, this new use for GPS technology is a concern for some.

If private citizens have access to this technology, what is to stop governments from using it to track the movements of “persons of interest?” Since no warrant or consent is needed in most states for a private citizen to make use of these services, they are opening alarming doors throughout the privacy rights spectrum. We do not want to give the government any more power than they are supposed to have.

GPS tracking is a valuable tool at times, but we must closely examine our motivations for adopting any new technology. As has been said before, “Just because we can do something, does not mean we should.” As any GPS provider would say, technology should be used responsibly.