GPS Tracking of State Worker Raises Privacy Issues

An anonymous reader writes with this excerpt from a Times Union article: "How far can state government go in keeping tabs on its employees? That's the question a mid-level appeals court will consider in the wake of a lawsuit filed by the New York Civil Liberties Union against the state Labor Department, in the case of a fired state worker who was tracked with a GPS device that investigators secretly attached to his personal car. ... State officials tracked Cunningham's whereabouts by secretly attaching a GPS device to his BMW. The electronic tailing went beyond what would normally be termed Cunningham's work hours, since the device was on for 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They even tracked him on a multi-day family vacation."

Comments

Glad I work in the private sector.

[Anonymous Coward]

No reputable company would ever try something this egregious .

Re:Glad I work in the private sector.

[mrchaotica]

the problem was they were tracking him 24/7, and that's illigal.

That, and attaching a device to his personal car should be considered some kind of tresspassing/vandalism.

New York

[Hatta]

New York's court of appeals has already determined that GPS tracking by law enforcement is illegal without a warrant. Since the powers of cops are a superset of the powers of an individual, this case should be a slam dunk for the plaintiff.

Sounds like what Cisco did to me

[Anonymous Coward]

Ex-Cisco employee here. Anon for a reason. They planted a gps tracker in my laptop and pushed down gps tracking software to my cell phone (personal phone, but attached to their email servers). All reporting back to some database servers in Cisco's corporate datacenters.

Found this, confronted them, and negotiated a significant settlement for not going public with the info. Don't care if they track me down now based on this posting, though, as they just laid off a ton of my great friends who remained. So, hopefully this will gain traction and other Cisco employees will look into this unethical (and illegal?) tracking of employees.

And you don't even want to know what kind of monitoring stuff they snuck into their IP Phones... If the public ever figures that out, Cisco has a great cover story ready: there's so much legacy code from Selsius (the original manufacturer of the phone technology) that it was cleverly hidden and unnoticed through years of QA testing.

Fan-tastic...

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

"Kate Nepveu, an assistant solicitor general, said the state realized the GPS tracking was intrusive, but Cunningham's pattern of misconduct and the difficulty of constant in-person surveillance justified the technique."

Yup, we knew that we had no business doing it; but he was a Bad Guy and doing our jobs is Hard. Cry, cry, pity me... Is there any sort of procedural abuse that one couldn't justify with exactly that line? Virtually everything we call "due process" is inconvenient for the prosecution, and I've never heard of somebody going after someone that they wouldn't at least say was guilty of misconduct...

Re:What was the state thinking?!?

[Amouth]

Maybe a better solution would have been to provide him a state vehicle with a hidden GPS tracker. :P

Or an Obvious one, functional or not. That might have got him back into line if there was wrong doing, or show he wasn't worth keeping, either way it would have been far cheaper than a lawsuit even if they win it.

Overtime!

[peacefinder]

If his employer was tracking him, it must have been for work purposes, right? So since he was on the clock, he should at least be paid his contracted rate for all the time he was tracked.