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Man Stalks Ex-girlfriend With GPS

Posted by michael on from the oh-look-it's-you-again dept.

grouchomarxist writes "According to this article at CNN: Police arrested a man they said tracked his ex-girlfriend's whereabouts by attaching a global positioning system to her car. Police said Gabrielyan attached a cellular phone to the woman's car on August 16 with a motion switch that turned on when the car moved, transmitting a signal each minute to a satellite. Information was then sent to a Web site that allowed Gabrielyan to monitor the woman's location." A ruling last year stated that police need a warrant to track individuals in a similar fashion.

8 of 415 comments (clear)

  1. Nice device ... by TheGavster · · Score: 4, Interesting

    It actually sounds like a neat project, just a sketchy application. I wonder if its legal to attach one to, say, your child's car. Perhaps make the sensor a bit less sensitive, so it only broadcasts a signal after an impact-type shock.

    --
    "Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
  2. Changing the battery? by Qender · · Score: 4, Interesting

    All this and he couldn't figure out how to hook the thing up to the car battery?

  3. Cool... by cryptochrome · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Any instructions on how to set one of these up? Sounds like the only improvement necessary was a hookup to the car battery. Duh! Also, don't phones these days have GPS or something like it built in, that locates the phone based on triangulation with cell towers? If you used that you could do away with the GPS unit altogether, and just need a motion switch to trigger a program on the phone that texts the location - or just make it transmit at intervals.

    --

    ---If you can't trust a nerd, who can you trust?

  4. How is this different that widespread surveillance by smiff · · Score: 5, Interesting
    For all of you people who say it's okay to put surveillance cameras on public streets, RFID tags on store merchandise, RFID readers on store doorways, and RFID toll-pass systems on highways. The general argument is that no one has a reasonable expectation of privacy in public.

    Yet it is illegal for a private citizen to follow someone in public. What is with the double standard?

  5. Re:WOW - this guy had a SATELLITE too? by penguinoid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    GPS receivers are completely passive

    I'll explain that better for everyone's benefit. Since GPS was a millitary technology, it was designed to allow you to find your position without yelling "I am here" to all your enemies. Now there is a difference between GPS tracking and cell phone tracking. Cell phones constantly communicate with the towers, which can triangulate and thus find the location of the cell phone, in this case it is the towers that are more passive (you could set up three recievers and track cell phones without sending out signals).

    So, that is why GPS is cool, and cell phone GPS-wannabe isn't.

    --
    Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
  6. Generation gap by Animats · · Score: 3, Interesting
    There's a big generation gap on this. Younger people have grown up surrounded by surveillance cameras and cell phones. They assume they're being tracked.

    And it doesn't bother them.

    I've talked with teenagers about what it means when their cell phone has GPS. They're not bothered by having their location reported. They like the idea of knowing where all their friends are. Then they'd know who's nearby, and could hook up. It's a feature.

  7. That'd be useful for my ex-wife... by rthille · · Score: 4, Interesting


    But so I could _NOT_ run into her.

    I kept running into her with my new girlfriend (obtained after the breakup with the wife). It was awkward, to say the least...

    --
    Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
  8. Similar Story by dropshot · · Score: 3, Interesting

    One night while doing some shift work (6PM-6AM), one of my co-workers went home for "lunch" at 2AM. He found that his wife wasn't home and, worse, had left their 4 year old son unattended. This was the second time that had happened, so he decided to investigate. The next time we were working night shifts, he put a GPS under a blanket that happened to be in the back of their hatchback. Twelve hours later (again after his wife hadn't been home at "lunchtime") he retrieved the GPS. He followed the recorded track around, and then along with a few friends, staked out the route the next time we were on mids. One of them spotted her in a parking lot and videotaped her from a distance for the next few hours. He contacted the cops (this being an military base and overseas) and turned over the tape. The police investigated, determined she was running a prostitution ring, and had her deported back to her country of origin. My co-worker was able to both successfuly divorce her and get custody of the child.