Is She Cheating? How to find out cheap!

GPS Trackers Watch Your Spouse, Your Kids and You!

Where is your wife tonight? How about your son? If you really want to know, there is an easy and inexpensive solution: A GPS auto or student tracker!

In the old days, following crooks by using tracking devices was high tech stuff. Today, you can easily figure out where Sue or Johnny went by putting a spy tracker in their vehicle or on their person!

There are three kinds of tracking devices. They are known in the industry as data loggers, data pullers and data pushers. Carefully choosing the right device is critical in order to get the information you want.

Data loggers are passive devices. They are like a Tom Tom with a travel memory. You attach the unit in a hidden place, usually it is attached to the trackee or his mode of transportation.

Now, bite your fingers until the vehicle comes back. You won't get any information about where your cheating spouse went until you plug the unit into your computer. This kind of GPS Tracker does not give you constant time readings.

The units are fairly inexpensive and cost nothing to run. The unit gets it's information from a free satelite beam. You get the whole travel history when the unit comes in. You can even follow the history on Google Maps, Google Earth or Mapquest if you get the right one.

This type system would be ineffective in watching an alzheimers patient or keeping tabs on a child at risk. If the child was kidnapped, you could not get location information until the unit was returned. Considering many kidnappers kill their victims to avoid detection, getting the tracking unit back would be of no help.

A Data Pusher GPS system sends units ot a central control. The central server, or control, then passes the information along to you. Users can get real time tracking this way. You can actually follow your suspect on Google as they make their way to their accomplices house or the grocery store. The problem with this kind of unit is it uses more battery power so must be replaced more often. Power consumption is reduced in some units by shutting off when they do not sense the vibration of vehicle movement. The units are reasonably priced.

Finally, Data pullers extract locaiton data from the unit on command. They use less energy because the unit can stay dormant until it gets a ping from home base. These units have two way communications. The unit provides location information to the central control, and central control tells the unit when it is time to go to bed. These units are failry expensive and beyond the range of most private detectives, much less the average spouse spy.

Before you stick a tracking device on Johnny’s corvette, or put one on your buddy's motorcycle, you might want to consider the legal issues in unauthorized vehicle tracking. There is an infrigement on privacy issue here.

So far the law has been supportive of vehicle tracking for law enforcement if the device is put on the vehicle while on the street. The court is hostile to putting a tracker on while it is on private property or parked in the garage. In any case, law enforcement is wise to get a warrant or risk the chance the evidence will be thrown out of court on the theory of the ‘poison pill’.

What about you and me? Whether or not you are breaking the law by placing a tracking device on a vehicle is not known for sure. There are lots of issues to cloud the water. Is the other person a minor whom you are responsible for? How about your wife? What about your buddys wife?

The answers are not clear yet. One thing is for sure, you don’t want to be the cat they use to define the law. In short, it is recomended to use this kind of technology carefully. Be sure to obtain advise from your attorney about the risks.

Wrongful use of gps trackers may have civil and criminal consequences. Having to defend a law suit in civil court is expensive. Defending a criminal charge could be worse since the consequences of losing your case in criminal court could mean jail. In either case, civil or criminal, you would probably be pretty unhappy if all you found out from your intruding gps person tracker was you wife spent lots of time a K-mart?

Tim Paynter is an Colorado attorney, civil rights activist and a defender of the oppressed. He handles traffic matters, zoning issues, real estate matters to name a few.