Spy Review

With increasingly pervasive vehicle location trackers, some people will be concerned that they are being tracked. This article gives you an overview of the different types of trackers that exist.

Trackers do come in a massive variety, the main types of trackers are:

• GPS trackers, where the person tracking you can see the location remotely on a computer via the internet
• GSM trackers, which exploit the mobile cell phone networks to operate, and use local cell masts to approximate a location. Again, location is remotely viewed on the internet.
• GPS loggers, where a device records the journal made using GPS data and a small flash memory device. The person tracking you ‘plays back’ the logs to see where you went and at what time. This tracking is not done live, just later.
• RF trackers, a bit old-fashioned now, but allow a following vehicle to determine what direction the tracked vehicle heading towards. Nicknamed ‘bumper beepers’.

The difficulty in finding the tracker will depend on who installed the tracker and the size of the tracking device. Clearly a tracker installed by a novice will be easier to find than one installed by a professional. If you know your vehicle well, then you’ll be able to spot what looks out of place more readily.

Counter-surveillance gadgets can potentially help you locate a device, but are a tool not a solution. A sensitive RF sniffer would help you to complete a quicker sweep of a vehicle, but will give you a relatively low success rate. GPS devices are typically low bandwidth, meaning sporadic RF output which is difficult to detect in a sweep. RF trackers emit a constant RF signal, and therefore are trivial to detect. GSM trackers typically connect to local cell networks regularly, and so are easier to detect than GPS devices.

A general rule that applies to any counter-surveillance; namely that a finger-tip search will always give you the best success rate of finding any device. However, it could take several hours to finger-tip search a whole vehicle. A determined professional could conceal a tracker in the electrical features of a vehicle, making it appear part of the vehicle itself! It depends if someone has access to the inside of the vehicle (a partner?) or not (a private detective?).

A mixture of the 2 search techniques is often employed for practical reasons. By focusing on certain areas of a vehicle, you can make guesses where you’d expect to find the tracking device based on who you suspect is bugging you.

So here are some common areas used for tracking devices:

• Spare wheel or tyre (inside or out)
• Any part of the bumper or rim
• Glove compartment
• Wheel arch above each wheel
• Engine area, particularly around the sides
• Behind the dashboard and around the steering column
• Behind or near the car radio
• Underneath seats
• The boot (trunk to our American friends)
• Behind light fittings
• In toolboxes, accessory compartments, etc

Good luck with the bug hunt!