Your prescription painkillers could have a tiny GPS tracker hidden inside

Privacy advocates are raising objections over police placement of tiny GPS trackers in commonly stolen items like prescription pain medicine and cash. While such trackers were initially used to capture specific criminals — for example, by placing one on a credit card skimmer found on a gas pump and then following it after the skimmer was collected — some police departments have begun preemptively placing them on items they think might get stolen.

The lack of rules regarding this new technology opens the door to abuse, civil libertarians say. "As a baseline, I don't think people should be tracked with GPS without a warrant," argues Jay Stanley of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). "If somebody steals an object and the police don't arrest them for six months and just collect information about how they're living their life, that could be problematic."

And there's also the worry that tracked items could fall into innocent hands. A bank robber might use tracked money to pay someone who was totally uninvolved in the crime, or a pharmacist could accidentally give a tracked bottle of OxyContin to a legitimate customer — an unlikely outcome, to be sure, but not outside the realm of possibility.

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