I don't get the co-worker argument. Lots of guys and girls I know met and date someone they work with. Some have even married.
What's not to get? In smaller companies, it can be quite a work distraction, whether it is the infatuation phase (which you are in now), the fighting phase, or the we-no-longer-talk-to-each-other phase.
Harrington, this was the front page article on today's Chicago Sun-TImes. Fitting, I must say. http://www.suntimes.com/technology/1591467,CST-NWS-gps26.article
Marriage in the GPS age: Tracking cheating hearts
TECHNOLOGY | Checking out your alibi is easier, cheaper than ever with GPS technology that nearly tracks your every move
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May 26, 2009
<!-- Article By Line --> BY
FRANK MAIN Staff Reporter/fmain@suntimes.com
<!-- Article's First Paragraph --> The well-to-do suburban professional hid a tiny GPS tracking device in his family car.
His cheating wife dropped her kids off with her dad, a convicted felon. She headed to a South Side motel for a rendezvous with her lover.
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A GPS device is affixed to a spare tire under an SUV. Checking out your alibi is easier, cheaper than ever with GPS technology that nearly tracks your every move.
(John J. Kim/Sun-Times)
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The global positioning system documented her route to the motel and back -- an adulterous trip she took more than a dozen times. A private investigator snapped a photo of the couple walking out of the motel together.
In his divorce filing, the husband confronted his wife with the incriminating evidence.
"She is presently asking for forgiveness for her dalliances," said the husband's divorce lawyer, Enrico J. Mirabelli, who started using GPS trackers in his cases less than a year ago.
As they have grown more affordable, GPS trackers have become the latest weapon on the marital battlefront. On the Internet, they sell for under $1,000. The cheapest ones store information that's later downloaded onto a computer that displays the route on a map. The most advanced can show the vehicle's path in real time.
Smaller than a microcassette recorder, they're easily concealed in a glove box or a seat pocket. And as long as you own the vehicle, putting a GPS tracker on it is legal.
"The GPS is a poor man's investigator," Mirabelli said.
In a survey last year of the nation's top divorce attorneys, 88 percent of them reported a rise in cases relying on electronic data as evidence.
E-mail and Internet browsing histories have been big. And divorce lawyers also have started using electronic tollway records such as I-Pass to place a client's spouse in a certain place and time.
But Mirabelli said he rarely subpoenas I-Pass records these days because GPS information is so much more detailed.
Mirabelli estimated that GPS trackers have saved him up to 80 percent of the expense of having a private investigator working around the clock to uncover infidelity.
"You can sit out there for four days, and nothing might happen," said private investigator Paul Ciolino. "If I have someone out there at $120 an hour for 14 hours a day and nothing happens, that gets expensive. But if the GPS says the car is going to a location every Thursday at 2, now you can go take a look."
Private investigator Wayne Halick said he usually affixes the GPS devices to the bottom of the car, using a magnet attached to the device.
"In Chicago, I use duct tape to keep them on because the potholes are so bad," Halick said.
GPS devices got their start as an investigative tool when police began using them to track the movement of criminal suspects. In 2005, police used the GPS built into Eric C. Hanson's sport-utility vehicle to show his whereabouts after his parents, sister and brother-in-law were killed in Naperville. Hanson has been convicted of murder and sentenced to death in their killings.
The City of Chicago has been putting GPS devices on the cars of cops, inspectors and other workers as a way to make sure they're doing their jobs.
Ciolino said he has been using the devices on behalf of companies trying to prove their executives are slacking off. GPS tracked executives to restaurants where they were enjoying three-hour lunches and to golf courses where they were playing hooky with buddies instead of drumming up business.
In divorce cases, GPS evidence doesn't affect the division of assets because Illinois is a "no fault" state. In some other states, a spouse who proves the other's fault can get a bigger share of the marital property or more alimony.
But GPS still can be used to show that a parent is unfit, for instance, if the couple is fighting over custody of their children. And it can help show that a spouse was draining assets from the household by spending money on a lover or losing cash at a casino, Mirabelli said.
GPS trackers "aren't the cure to cancer," but they "add more credibility than saying, 'I followed the person in a car,' " divorce attorney Michael W. Kalcheim said.
Another divorce lawyer, Jeffery M. Leving, said his investigators have been using GPS devices as one of the many weapons in their evidentiary arsenal.
But Leving said he prefers the gumshoe techniques he learned decades ago when he worked as a private investigator, such as rummaging through garbage. Once in a divorce case, he found love letters between a wife and another woman, as well as drug paraphernalia.
"Dirty work," he said, "but effective."