There are all kinds of cheap new ways to spy on people. Thanks, technology! One form of spousal spying that seems to be quite popular is placing a GPS tracker on a significant other's car to track their location. A New Jersey judge ruled earlier this year that a wife who did this to out a cheating spouse did not break any laws, because the tracker only followed the car's whereabouts on public roads where a driver should expect no privacy. In a new case involving an abusive spouse who used a tracking device to stalk and threaten his wife, a Minnesota judge made a similar decision, but the emphasis was on the fact that he had partial ownership of the car. Husbands and wives, this may make you reconsider joint ownership of any of your property that might be used to spy on you.
In the Minnesota case, which Eric Goldman sent along to me, Danny Lee Hormann became obsessed with his wife's social life and whereabouts after she informed him in 2008 that she wanted a divorce. He secretly put a tracker on her car; she also alleges that he out spyware on her phone and the family computer. He repeatedly freaked her out by revealing that he knew where she'd been. At one point, he showed up at a secluded lakeside cabin that she didn't think that he knew about (and "attacked an acquaintance of hers," according to court documents. Busted.).
In March 2010, Mrs. Hormann took her car to a mechanic who discovered and removed the tracking device. Hormann was convicted of stalking his wife and violating a Minnesota law that criminalizes surreptitious electronic monitoring of another individual, including with a tracking device. An appeals judge later reversed the latter conviction, though. While his intimidating and physically abusive behavior warranted the stalking conviction, the Judge David Minge ruled that Hormann had a legal right to put a tracking device on the car because he was a partial owner.
This analysis leads me to suspect that the husband who secretly activated a "Find My Friends" location-tracking app on the iPhone he bought for his wife to find out if she was cheating (spoiler: she was) may also have been in the legal clear.
While it seems that Big Husbands and Big Wives are in the clear to track cars, the constitutionality of Big Brother doing this without a warrant is still unresolved. Since judges around the country have come to different opinions on this, the Supreme Court will be weighing in this term in the case of Antoine Jones, a D.C. nightclub owner whose stash of hundreds of pounds of cocaine was discovered after a GPS tracker police placed on his car helped reveal he was running a multi-million dollar drug operation. Though the police had gotten a warrant to place a tracker on the car, they left it there for a few weeks after the warrant expired. The Supremes will hear arguments in the case on November 8, and decide whether law enforcement needs a warrant to do what husbands and wives are apparently free to do.
