Quote:
Originally Posted by Cevan
It depends on what state you are in. If someone consents to having a tracking device placed on their personal property, I can't imagine that would be an issue anywhere. I think what JMS was referring to was unauthorized placement. Here in Massachusetts, that very issue was argued in our Supreme Judicial Court recently. A decision is pending.
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That’s exactly what I was saying. You definitely need permission, either permission from a judge in the form of a warrant, or from the person that you want to monitor needs to consent to it. And I highly doubt anyone would be ok with being tracked and just sign off on it, especially if/when they know it’s for repossession purposes. The Supreme Court ruled on this very issue, and determined that a gps tracking device on a vehicle is consider a search, and therefore protected by the fourth amendment. So no, you can’t just do this, any dealer doing so is violating your constitutional rights without your signing off on it, and if even if you did sign off on it that’s a whole ‘nother argument altogether. And since this is a constitutional right afforded to every citizen, why would anyone be willing to sign away their constitutional rights? They wouldn’t. This isn’t done, I firmly stand behind my previous statement.
Read this article, it will help clear it up...
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/03/supreme-court-if-youre-being-gps-tracked-youre-being-searched/389114/
Here is the cliff notes version copy and pasted from that same article...
“the Court has considered the Fourth Amendment quite a bit recently. In 2012, it ruled that placing a GPS tracker on a suspect’s car, without a warrant, counted as an unreasonable search.”
Christien, those monitoring services you refer to are legit and legal, I’m not saying they are not, as I have one myself on one of my own cars. But they are NOT being used by dealers to track their inventory of financed vehicles for if/when they need to repossess them. They would be violating each customer’s constitutional rights by doing so.