Comment by yock

14 years ago

I would think this isn't limited to in-vehicle hardware like OnStar, but rather it seems applicable to smartphones too. That smartphone in your pocket is moving just as fast as your car and could just as easily be used to gather such data. Perhaps not as fine grained as the OnStar information (talking coarse vs fine location) but there's certainly enough data casually collected by your dormant smartphone to enable much of the same exploitation.

1 comment

yock

boredguy8 14 years ago

If you have some time, read "Warrantless location Tracking" 83 N.Y.U.L. Rev. 1324 http://www.law.nyu.edu/ecm_dlv2/groups/public/@nyu_law_websi...

  A common step in police investigations today is to secure a court
  order tracking the movements of a suspect or anyone else whose 
  location the police believe useful. The flip side of this 
  powerful tool, though, is how revealing and intrusive it is. Few 
  people would be comfortable being followed by a police officer 
  all day, even if they did nothing illegal or even interesting. 
  Justice Brandeis once invoked the "right to be let alone,"  and 
  undetectable location tracking pressures the alone part: No one 
  is "let alone" if the police may, without notice or probable 
  cause, find out everywhere they go for a day or a month.

It's a good, if disturbing, read.