This was inevitable. The Supreme Court held a long time ago that the government can surreptitiously put a transmitter on a car and track it. (Think 1970s cop mo

This was inevitable. The Supreme Court held a long time ago that the government can surreptitiously put a transmitter on a car and track it. (Think 1970s cop movie.) GPS is a clear extension of that rule. The 9th Circuit was just following the precedent it is bound to. I kinda think the Supreme Court got it wrong years ago and the 9th got it wrong today. But in the long run that won't matter. The erosion of privacy is inevitable. Technology is advancing too fast. The solution is not to put the government in the akward position of self-imposing constraints that regular people do not observe. (E.g. the government can't track you on Foursquare but your friends can.) No, the solution isn't in access, it's in use. The Supreme Court needs to use the Fourth Amendment to limit the actual, in-court use of "private" information. It needs to ensure that that use is open to the press and the public. And most importantly, Congress needs to relax those laws that until now we have only accepted because they were difficult to track and so difficult to enforce broadly. (Read: traffic and drug laws.)