Friday, August 27, 2010

Your Driveway Is Mine!

An appeals court out west says that it's okay for the government to attach a GPS tracker to your car if its parked on the driveway, because you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy there. It's out in the open, after all.

The people who do have a reasonable expectation of privacy in such a case would be the people with electric gates and guarded access to their property. The gates and guards extend the area where they can say this is mine. Your driveway? Feh. Lets just see what you've got in that glovebox.....

"You left place A, at this time, you went to place B, you took this street -- that information can be gleaned in a variety of ways," said David Rivkin, a former Justice Department attorney. "It can be old surveillance, by tailing you unbeknownst to you; it could be a GPS."He says that a person cannot automatically expect privacy just because something is on private property. "You have to take measures -- to build a fence, to put the car in the garage" or post a no-trespassing sign, he said. "If you don't do that, you're not going to get the privacy."

4 comments:

Tabor said...

See my little deer fence (net) not only keeps them little grazers out...it gives me the right to privacy.

Cerulean Bill said...

As long as someone couldn't make the plausible argument that they thought it was a lawn ornament. Might want to add a laser turret to the house....

STAG said...

And they still won't let me mine the property!

Cerulean Bill said...

Well, yeah, but that's because you're in Canada, where people are, for the most part, rational.