A weirdly relevant case from Switzerland [0]. The Swiss court ruled that it's totally legal to put GPS trackers on other peoples cars to track them.

The court argued that a car is so public and visible that the GPS tracker is only collecting "public knowledge" anyway.

[0] https://www.tagesanzeiger.ch/panorama/vermischtes/wenn-am-au...

In the US, the SCOTUS has ruled differently: that attaching a GPS tracking device to a car constitutes a search under the Fourth Amendment and requires a warrant. See US v. Jones (2012) and Grady v. North Carolina (2015).

As a fellow dutchman, I'm not sure what organization would track ships. Would you mind sharing? It sounds interesting.

Well, basically any nautical organization tracks them to some extent (i.e. ports, tugs, pilots, whatever).

We specifically use AIS [1], tracking ships is quite easy because of it. Other methods are radar.

Because it so relatively easy, there are a lot of commercial companies doing it too. The most well-known is probably MarineTraffic [2]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_identification_syste...

[2] https://www.marinetraffic.com/

I recently heard about people being fined for sailing in a prohibited zone (I believe an exclusion zone around a drilling platform). How does that jive with the rules against keeping tracking information of personal vessels?

The tracking you can do for personal vessels is limited, not forbidden.

Enforcing an prohibited zone, which exists for safety, probably is well within parameters. If you only track and save the vessel that are very close to your drilling platform because you can't track a persons movements from just that data.

If you want privacy maybe don’t drive around on what is literally government property.

I'd rather think of roads(and national parks, and beaches, and mountains) as "ours" not as "government property". I have the right to be there because I'm the citizen of the country.

Privately owned boats and autonomous cars are government property?

That post probably means public roads.

I guess I can understand the argument but I don't see what kind of world view thinks that you can go out into the world r have privacy. Roads are what connect the vast majority of all land. It's not like you can just trespass into other people's land and expect privacy either

The world view is that what happens in public space is not private; you can't expect privacy for things you do in public.

If you go to a public concert, people can look at you, note that you were here and tell that to others. That doesn't violate privacy because you had no privacy there to begin with. And in a similar manner, if you drove last thursday on a particular road, whoever bothered to look at you and your car is allowed to do so, note that you were there, write it down and tell that to others.

Privacy is about your private stuff - what you do in your private space, what you have in your private items. If you go out in the public, the things that you do (and where, and when, and with whom) are not private anymore.

In a public space a random person might 'see' you there - but they would not know who you were and may not even remember you correctly. A machine on the other hand remembers perfectly and records constantly. As far as your car-the random observer may be hard pressed to note the fact of your license plate number while trying to remember what kind and color your car was.