Jilted Spouses Turn to Technology to Keep Tabs on Partners
Hard-scrabbled, bourbon-swilling private investigators may soon go the way of newspapers, as in forced out of business by advances in technology. With GPS tracking software and other monitoring devices readily available and increasingly affordable, a growing number of people are doing the dirty work themselves. Therefore, the era of sweat-stained PIs eating burgers in rundown cars while they take pictures of cheating spouses may be drawing to a close.
The current economic downturn certainly hasn't diminished the number of wayward wives and adulterous husbands, and do-it-yourself surveillance companies are happy to cater to the paranoid. George Karonis, president of LiveViewGPS told ABC News, "Even in this economy our business continues to grow," pointing out that 40-percent of his customer base uses his services to monitor family members or their automobiles. Another owner, Jeffrey Jurist of SpyAssociates.com, said, "Greed, lust and fear are the three high growth industries and this covers all three."
Demonstrating just how widespread the phenomenon is becoming, one company, U.S Fleet Tracking, described to ABC a situation in which both a husband and wife, suspicious of each other, enlisted the company's services to monitor one another. Even celebrities are getting in on the act, as the NY Post reported that former NFL star Michael Strahan had equipped his ex-girlfriend's Range Rover with a tracking device (she found it before the article).
The inherent problem associated with people taking spying into their own hands is the blurred line between monitoring and stalking, which is illegal but defined differently in various states. The Australian government was already forced to address this issue -- the Australian Surveillance Devices Act makes it illegal to track someone without their consent. Could similar legislation in the U.S be far behind? [From: ABC News]
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