5 carjackings a day. Double NY and LA combined Drivers in Cook County now have a new way to try to deter carjackings and recover stolen cars more quickly. "Our city and the people in it are rightfully terrified," said Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart on Thursday. "You cannot really think of a crime that could be more terrifying than somebody coming up to you when you’re in the security of your car and having a gun pulled on you." Sheriff Dart is asking drivers to register their car to be tracked when stolen. "It will be something to deter people because we have talked to people we take into custody, and trust me, they have been clear that they don’t want to be dealing with cars that they know we are tracking,” Dart said. Cook County Sheriff Urges Drivers to Register Vehicles to Reduce Carjackings – NBC Chicago
No shit Sheriff! Really, they told you they don’t want steal cars that were tracked? Who’da thunk it?
The balance between safety and privacy rights continues to trend (by necessity) toward safety, unfortunately. Used to be that only our dogs had monitoring chips. Between social media check-ins, apps that track, etc., future generations will have no idea what he right to privacy really is, and how broad it’s supposed to have been. We’ll all soon be living on The Truman Show if we aren’t already.
Liberal cities tracking your car and “conservative” states doing DNA databases for schoolchildren, you know, in case their bullet riddled corpses need to be identified. Interesting times.
Anti-theft trackers on cars aren't anything new. The Lojack tracking device has been around over 35 years. Home - LoJack LoJack - Wikipedia The original LoJack system was created and patented in 1979 by William Reagan, a former Medfield, Massachusetts police commissioner, who went on to establish LoJack Corporation in Medfield. The name "LoJack" was coined to be the "antithesis of hijack", wherein "hijack" refers to the theft of a vehicle through force. The original LoJack was a hardware and radio based system designed to prevent theft of a vehicle and aid in the vehicle’s recovery by transmitting vehicle location to the LoJack receiver. It was installed in the vehicle and connected to the starting mechanism such that only the original key would start the vehicle. By the way several automobile insurance companies offer a discount for cars equipped with GPS based anti-theft trackers.
I was referring to giving authorization to the government to track your car, not the drivers ability to do so.
Implicit in the proposal is that although the car would be equipped with a tracking device it would only be used by government after the car was reported stolen or carjacked, not unlike the Lojack device. Similar although slightly off-topic, apparently a large number of drivers are willing to agree to the tracking of their driving behavior in exchange for lower insurance rate. Seems to be much more invasive than simply tracking a vehicle after it's reported stolen. Speaking only for myself, I have not and will probably never agree to have my insurance company monitor my driving behavior and I'm a rather safe driver.
