[MereInterest]

I'll bite. The problem is asymmetry of information, and that the protections haven't advanced alongside the ease of collecting information.

For example, imaging you have a suspect and want to trail them. The courts have established that you have no expectation of privacy when in a public area, so an officer can trail your car and watch where you go. You only have so many officers, and so there are implicit limits on how many people you can trail in person. But if instead of sending an officer to trail a suspect, you attach a GPS tracker to the suspect's car, suddenly that restriction is removed. Instead of spending weeks trailing a single suspect, you could attach dozens of trackers to dozens of cars, or you could request location data from a third party. The lower cost of breaking somebody's privacy allows it to be done more frequently, even if the explicit legal protections haven't changed.

The problem isn't the technology itself, but that protections of privacy and protections against unreasonable searches haven't advanced alongside the technology.

[lr4444lr]

I am pretty sure thr police cannot put a GPS tracker on your car without a warrant.

[MereInterest]

Whether or not there is a warrant is tangential to my argument. There used to be hard physical limits to the amount of surveillance that could be done. Now, the only limits are legal limits. Those legal limits were never designed to be the only limit, and are insufficient in their current form.

[red_hobbit]

Cops were doing that without a warrant in the past. In 2012 it was ruled illegal by the courts. Here's a wired article. https://www.wired.com/story/man-charged-with-theft-for-remov...

[bombcar]

And now they don’t have to because you carry your own gps tracker with you and Google will sing easily.

[Gigablah]

Your telco is way more eager to sell your information.

[0des]

You'd be wrong in the USA. Anybody who parks in any public space or outdoors can have a unit placed on their vehicle by anybody.

[stjohnswarts]

It's still illegal. I could go around keying people's car for potentially a lifetime without getting caught but it's still illegal and that's what we were talking about in the thread.

[lr4444lr]

Legally?

[adgjlsfhk1]

It doesn't matter. If they do it illegally, you won't find out unless you find it on your car.

[hellbannedguy]

Get the cops to high crime areas.

There is no need for the amount of law enforcement I have in my county of Marin.

They would then have more time to put GPS's on vechicles, and less time for Revenue Collection.

[lavabiopsy]

How is there asymmetry of information? AFAIK there have been just as many tech advances in police accountability as well, such as the prevalence of body cams, or the ability to see these warrants as they are issued in real time on a police web site, etc. Of course there are other issues at play but I think you may have missed some things that are on the other side, it's very feasible for one person to track many police officers much in the same way that you describe. What would be questionable is if the police were trying to stop the public from doing so.