The devices that these cops are using must include some sort of transmitter. This is more like Lojack, or the combined GPS/cell-phone services provided by OnStar.
So I don't want stories like this to scare people away from heading to the store and picking up a standalone GPS navigation system, or ordering one (without OnStar) in their car. They're pretty cool and useful devices.
(As for cell phones with GPS built in---well, I don't know enough about them to know for sure how much of a privacy scare they are. But there is definitely potential for scariness there.)
I don't know about suspect's cars, but I am getting one for my car when my daughter starts driving.
You are correct, and therefore, it should be a simple matter of using an electronic "sweeper" device on your vehicle to detect the outgoing signal. You can then presumably do with it as you will, seeing as once it is attached to your vehicle (your property) it becomes part of that vehicle, and thus is yours.
A criminal has to be sentenced by a court before he can be required to wear a monitoring bracelet. This is nothing more than a monitoring bracelet for your car, and thus you deserve all the protection of the law in order for the cops to be allowed to legally attach one to your car. If they don't give that to you, then they have merely made a present to you of a (presumably not cheap) GPS tracking device.
A quick technological note here. The GPS devices you buy in your store do not transmit. They only receive. So they cannot be used to track your vehicle from afar.
Correct. They do, however, store a "track" of recent movement and the last reliable position fix received. Many models include an emergency "clear memory" key combination which will delete all saved waypoints, and some or all of the above information.
The devices that these cops are using must include some sort of transmitter. This is more like Lojack, or the combined GPS/cell-phone services provided by OnStar.Not necessarily. They could just store a track in memory for recovery later, or they could stay quiet and send a burst of data rarely, a compressed stream of time/position stamps only when memory fills up...