You're right about giving people their own tracking devices. More and more phones and cameras use GPS to "geotag" their photos with location data - time stamps are old hat already. When I started seeing ads for online photo storage for cel phones it dawned on me - law enforcement often gets overreaching approval to go through electronic records; all they would have to do is get a warrant to search one server hosting cel phone photos, and then run a facial recognition program over it and they would know exactly who was where, and when, and who they associate with. It's not some Minority Report conspiracy theory - this is simple to do with currently available, and even mature tech. It'll just be a little longer before it's very practical because geotagging is still catching on.

Since we can't count on laws to enforce courteously not violating people's privacy, I think the answer would be legal requirements for data encryption and storage for such records - on a phone photo host server they would have to encrypt every client's photos with a separate key, either known only to the client, or hashed from a password of theirs. This would prevent the convenient searching of whole servers at a time.

aaaaanyway, that was kind of a tangent, so back to the battery - that thing looks like it has the exact same dimensions as my Motorola KRZR battery. That's interesting because I was just thinking it may be foiled by a phone like mine that uses a sheet metal battery cover - apparently not so much.

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@maztec: Actually it is a big step. I don't have an expectation of privacy for my car. Its got windows, its licensed by the state and travels on public streets. I do have an expectation of privacy in my home and in my person.

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The point is that they don't need an excuse to put one of these things on your car. If this goes through, what's to stop them from putting cameras in your house without a warrant? Admittedly, those are two very different scenarios, but once a precedent like this is set, it is very easy for them to justify further invasions of privacy down the line. I'm all for public safety, but we need to be careful of what kind of behavior this sort of thing can set up down the road.

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If they were gaining that access to plant this "bug", then I would presume it would fall under the same law as you are describing. The argument being made is that they are just making it easier to do something they already can (surveillance), and I would think it's also possible for them to easily listen in on someone's conversation; however; being able to do so in someone's house is not legal without a warrant/probable cause or whatever (it used to be, I don't know about it now).

As in, they can easily listen to you, but that doesn't mean that planting a bug inside someone's house without the right to do so is legal merely because they could have done it through another method.

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* retreats to fortified bunker *

* er...heheh...apartment *

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