What Can You Do When Your Mini-Bar Is Spying On You?

It was maybe the most impressive Fourth Amendment privacy violation cases: The Supreme Court had many oral arguments on Tuesday on the subject whether the police can attach GPS trackers to vehicles, without having a court warrant for that, and watch every movement of that car.

GPS tracking devices

Obama administration told all the judges that it has completely unchained right to do such surveillance, for any long it wishes, on any quantity of people it wishes, without any juridical oversight whatsoever. That also includes attaching GPS tracking devices on the vehicles of the Supreme Court judges, the feds said. It is an alarming idea in the age where GPS tracking tools have a size of the credit card and the price less than $200 and most likely they will become smaller, cheaper and would have greater power, just like all other PC devices.

Privacy laws

I was listening carefully to the arguments and worrying that my quick gutting of the full mini-bar in my comfortable D.C. hotel might lead to the court’s eventual decision against privacy laws.

That sobering fright is not nearly far-fetched. Here is why:

I went just BYOB to the hotel mini-bar to pull out sodas, beer and some snacks — to set them aside for later return, and took Sierra Nevada Pale Ale instead. Only later I saw the notice inside the refrigerator that said:

For your convenience, any product removed from the mini-bar is automatically charged to your account.

All this while Supreme Court was arguing whether Americans have "reasonable" expectations their movements wouldn't be electronically watched. But today we pay $300 for the hotel room which spies secretly on your consumption of alcohol, when millions of people "check in" their every move on FourSquare and on Facebook voluntarily, and when we automatically give all kinds of mobile phone applications we use all rights to track us all around we go.

All those things mean that we submit to all kinds of warrantless monitoring of our movements voluntarily.

But for those of you who are not willing to let stand actions of the feds and letting them track you 24 hours a day 365 days a year there is an option to choose. Use GPS trackers jammer for cars and no matter what type of GPS tracker is attached to your vehicle, it would not work as it was supposed to.

What do you think about the Supreme Court’s arguments? What are your thoughts about the tracking and the Fourth Amendment? Please tell us your opinion in the comments!