However you may feel about the theft charge, if you find a tracker on your car, don't take it off. It's an occasion to call the police. Someone is either committing a crime by tracking you illegally or you're letting the police know you found their tracker. Maybe they'll remove it, as once the tracker is known to exist it's useless.
If you want to go the route of civil disobedience and take it off on moral grounds, you can do that too, but you'll probably go to jail. This isn't the first time I've heard of this, the FBI has charged people for tampering with the trackers they've put on people's cars.
Reading that, it sounds like a situation to call/drive to/or otherwise get the attention of the police. Attaching a tracking device to your vehicle is a significant indication of malicious intent. It's a potentially life threatening situation and should be treated as such.
I think the issue is taking the tracker inside your garage/house where the police can track it (it is a tracker after all) while in your possession. A better approach would be to pull over into the shoulder on the highway, remove it there, leave it on the side of the road, and drive off. Then if they want it they can drive out to go get it. "Sorry officer, it must've just fallen off my car while I was driving."
Legally, what is happening when the police put a tracker on a car? It isn't a gift, or a transfer of ownership - otherwise the police retieving it would be theft. On the other hand, the vehicle owner should not be held responsible for damage to a device they don't know about. Does it become lost property?
If the disappearance of public property attached to a vehicle can be used to justify a search warrant, this seems like it would be ripe for abuse. The police could apply for a tracking warrant, wait a week, claim their tracker was lost, and then perform whatever searches they want on the private property.
> What happens if someone steals my vehicle? What steps should I take?
Report it. Call 911 and let the Office of Unified Communications dispatcher know that you vehicle has a tracking device. When responding officers arrive, you will have to provide them with the real-time location of the device.
I don't know, this almost sounds reasonable. Doesn't seem that you have to give access to your Apple account to police, just tell them where the car is
If you have attached a device to my vehicle without my consent, you've forfeited ownership. I have no idea how any rational person (or court, especially) could conclude it would be theft to remove the tracker. It's good to see some sanity.
The FBI demanded the device back and she said no. Amazingly, that was the end of the story—until the Afifi story came out, and she decided to give Wired the tracker.
The interesting legal question (in addition to whether you need a warrant to do this sort of thing) is who owns something attached to your car?
> Since you don't know whose tracker it is maybe the best thing to do is "lose" it again.
Often, knowledge of surveillance almost completely diminishes its effectiveness. If you know your car has a tracker on it, the police won't get anything useful out of it, because you won't drive to any place you don't want the cops to know about.
Leaving it in place also has the advantage that you don't alert the police that you know about the surveillance.
IANAL but IIRC the GPS tracking was thrown out on narrow technical grounds - without a warrant the cops can't trespass upon your vehicle to install the tracker. They didn't say there was anything inherently wrong with the tracking itself. In other words, it would be just as illegal for the cops to surreptitiously attach an inert brick to your car without a warrant.
The dealer even added a $250 fee to "remove" this device, but I found it was still installed, so I think I ended up footing the bill for the device itself.
The device is ostensibly to protect inventory from loss, but it seems like they are incentivizing dealers to leave these in cars to capture location data, for whatever reason.
In most cases the car trackers are trivially simple for criminals to defeat. They really aren't a big detergent. Even if you're using a good aftermarket one, its not a detergent but a recovery tool - if they know about it they can usually disable it.
If you're friend has had their car stolen so many times, what are they doing about it?
If you want to go the route of civil disobedience and take it off on moral grounds, you can do that too, but you'll probably go to jail. This isn't the first time I've heard of this, the FBI has charged people for tampering with the trackers they've put on people's cars.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/afontevecchia/2011/05/09/heres-...
reply