Tag: gps tracking spouse

Secretly Track Your Spouse With GPS: Data Loggers

Have you ever thought about secretly tracking your spouse’s movements? Has he or she been spending more and more time away from you with almost no explanation at all? If you are secretly being cheated on then you have a right to know. In my mind, you even have a right to secretly track your spouse with GPS. After all, they did promise to be faithful.

There are two main options for the person seeking to track their significant other. The first is a real time GPS tracking device. These devices are able to give you their position in real time and will not only let you know where they have been but also will allow you to follow them around in real time (hence the name). The second option is a data logger. These often have more battery life than the real time trackers, allowing the person tracking to collect massive amounts of data to process and analyze so that they can see exactly where the person has been. Through analyzing this information the person can find discrepancies or patterns in the behavior to see where the person is cheating.

I recently got my hands on a passive GPS tracking device called the iGot-U GT-600. It is a personal tracking device designed to log travel data for the international traveler or to analyze outdoor exercise activity. I figured it would be interesting to see if this device could also double as a covert GPS tracking device. Here are the results:

Preliminary Spouse GPS Tracking Test

Spouse GPS Tracking Test Run

Before I spent hours upon hours tracking my wife with the i-Gotu GPS data logger I figured I should give it a test drive to see how it would work. The picture found above represents my first attempt at tracking my wife’s car. I was in the car with her, so this really represents exactly what we did. We stopped by her friends house to pick up some tools and then drove around the neighborhood until the little one fell asleep.

According to the GPS tracker we were out for 00:24:11 and traveled a little less than 6 miles. The device also told me that we were actually only moving for 00:17:02. All this was captured in a little less than 400 distinct data points.

All this data is pretty interesting and useful for those looking to tracking a husband, a wife, a boyfriend, or a girlfriend. The first point of data – the amount of time traveled, is useful to know because it should correspond with the amount of time that you put the tracker in the car.

Total distance traveled is also valuable because it gives you an idea of all the different place that they could have gone. Just how far away is Target? Or their favorite hunting spot? When this is combined with the total trip time you get an idea of how fast they drive and how they are handling your car. I would want to know that data if it were my wife cheating on me.

The final bit of info that is really interesting is the total time moving. In this quick trip the differencet between our total travel time and the total movement time was only around 7 minutes. If I were to be tracking a husband or girlfriend and there was a trip where the total time moving was significantly different from the total travel time I would begin to get a little concerned. This is especially true if they spend most of the time sitting at an unknown location!

With all this data in hand I devised a plan that would simulate a more prolonged spouse tracking strategy. I would sneak into my wife’s car late at night and place the GPS tracking device in her glove compartment. I would occasionally check on the tracker every week to see if the tracker still had battery power or not. After the device lost its charge, I would grab the tracker and find out what I could about the habits of my wife (who is not cheating on me, by the way).

Here is what I found out by secretly tracking my spouse with GPS.

Extensive Spouse GPS Tracking Test

Spouse GPS Tracking Day 1

Battery Life

One of the first things that I wanted to do on this test is to check and see how long the battery would last on the GPS tracking device. Before starting out, I thought I might get a week’s worth of tracking before the battery would die out – boy was I surprised. I was able to track my wife’s car from November 9th all the way through December 6th. The battery lasted 28 days, which is very impressive.

Long battery life is definitely one of the benefits of using a data logger to secretly track your husband or wife. Most real time tracking devices can last a week at best since they are doing so much to provide all that data in real time. One of the benefits of the i-Gotu is that it goes into a battery save mode when it is not moving for an extended period of time.

Analyzing Data

With 28 days of tracking it was a pain to wade through all the data and try and figure out what happened each day, but if you are trying to find out if your lover is cheating and need GPS to help you figure it out then you will be motivated to go through it all. Since my wife isn’t cheating I had no motivation to go through it all and figure it out.

Thank goodness that the i-GotU software makes it easier to figure out what the data means. When using the Sport Tracker mode for their software you get a nice little calendar that lets you see what days had trips. Simply click on the day and you get some detailed information for that specific trip. This data includes a map of their trip that uses Google Maps, their max speed, the duration of their trip, as well as the actual time spent traveling. This is key if they make a quick trip to a friends house and stay their for hours.

In this micro view the mass of data makes sense. The only problem is that you will have to wade through all the days if you let the tracker run out of battery before retrieving it. What I would recommend for those seeking to track a wife or husband to see if they are cheating is to let the tracker run for a week at a time. This will give you smaller chunks of data to digest at any given point in time. The only problem with this is that you might get caught moving the device in and out so only try it if you can reasonably get away with it.

Viability

I have to be honest, the i-Got U exceeded my expectations. For a device that is not even built to be a covert GPS tracking device this unit blew me out of the water – and with a price tag under $100 you will be hard pressed to find a tracker that is going to beat the price. Similar products run several hundred dollars more than the i-Got U and do the same thing.

Overview

You should definitely consider this tracking device if you want to secretly track your spouse with GPS. It is a multipurpose GPS tracking device that is relatively easy on the pocket book (when compared to some of the alternatives). While it is terrible to have to be in a position where tracking your spouse is an option that you have to consider, getting a data logger like the i-Got U is definitely a choice that you should consider taking if all your other efforts to get at the truth have been unsuccessful. You have a right to know what is going on with the “flesh of your flesh” and the one that made a promise to you to be faithful.

Here is ouriGotU GPS Tracking Data Logger Review if you want to find out more information about this solid personal GPS tracking device.

GPS Tracking Is Not All Good

Perhaps I should have named this article Why Crazy People Should NOT Use GPS Tracking because I think that that statement is just as true as the one I ended up picking as the title for this post.  There are some crazy people in this world who will do all sorts of evil with things that are normally very useful and good for society at large.  This seems to be an unavoidable fact of existence.

But when you read (very sad, very disturbing – consider yourself warned) stories like this, where you have a person use the power of GPS to do terrible things it just makes you sick.

For those of you who didn’t click through and read the post the story goes something like this (very sad, very disturbing – skip past the indented paragraphs if you don’t want to read it):

There is a man – a controlling, small little man – who tries to make himself big by pushing around his wife.  She eventually gets fed up and decides the ditch the dude.  There is another man involved.  The small man is upset that his wife isn’t home to cook him dinner or something and enlists the help of his teenage daughter to use the GPS in his wife’s cell phone to track her location.  When he finds her his wife tells him that she is leaving him and that she isn’t going home with him.  The small man leaves angry.

But it gets worse … much, much worse.  The small man, in a total act of cowardice takes out his anger against his wife on his own children.  While they sleep, one by one, he walks through his home with  loaded gun and proceeds to fire round after round into his own children.  Four lie dead in their beds where they slept.  The fifth child is found shot dead in the bathroom where there were signs of a struggle.  Sickening.

The small man then goes to the spot where he last saw his wife, presumably to find here and kill her as well.  When he doesn’t find her, he is apparently overcome with guilt over the horrendous thing that he has just done and he takes his own life.

Now this story is one of the saddest that I have heard in a long, long time.  What would posses a father to do such a thing?  How could he even think of doing any willful harm to his children?  It makes me sick to think that such a thing can happen.

But the purpose of this site is not to discuss what it means to be a man, or to show how a husband should lay down his life for his wife and children – not steal their lives as they sleep, or to how one ought to treat his wife with love and respect.  We are here to talk about GPS tracking and its application in society.

So was the GPS in the cell phone responsible for this tragedy?  Was it a cause?  Are the children dead because of it?

I certainly don’t think so.  Sure, the cell phone GPS did lead to the discovery of the infidelity.  It did contribute to the spark of hate and violence that would eventually lead to such a terrible tragedy, but it was by no means responsible for it.  The situation was already terrible – the man had been abusive to his wife since she was a 13 year old girl.  There relationship was one built on violence, fear, and control.  You had to know that the end of it was not going to be good – but no one could have expected it to end like this.

GPS did not have anything to do with the emotional and relational sickness that marks this terrible tragedy.  It was not the satellites that pulled the trigger on the gun.  It was not a GPS receiver that someone implanted the thought to kill children in the wicked man’s head.  No, GPS had nothing to do with the actual evil in this situation.

But it does highlight s0mething interest that I have been trying to point out about GPS tracking for some time now: if this technology is used wrongly it can have devastating effects.  It seems that the amount of good that a technology can do is only proportional to the amount of evil that it can do in the hands of perverse and wicked men.  I hope that cell phone GPS doesn’t get abused like this often, but I know that this is just a pipe dream.  It is probably happening right now as we speak … and that makes me profoundly sad.

Track Your Spouse With GPS

This is a pretty touchy topic in the world of GPS tracking. Some people think that tracking your spouse is the worst thing that you could ever do in your entire life. Others think that it is a fine thing to do given certain permissions from all parties involved. Still others feel like any form of tracking, even covert GPS tracking, is acceptable because of the agreement made by the couple in the covenant of marriage.* Our feelings about spouse GPS tracking are as varied as just about anything can be.

* Perhaps this should be added to the marriage vows: “.. in GPS tracking and out of GPS tracking …” What do you think?

Personally, I am somewhere between allowing covert GPS tracking and permission based tracking. The way I look at it is like this: When a couple gets married they are making a solemn vow to each other to be there for the other. They are committing to be together with their spouse until they die, no matter what types of circumstances come their way. We say “for richer or for poorer” and “in sick and in health” among many other vows and promises. What we do in this is make declarations that I will be married to you and provide for you and protect you no matter what comes our way – whether poverty or riches, sicknesses or good health. Marriage is for a lifetime.

As such, there is a great degree of responsibility between spouses to be faithful and serious about their marriage relationship. You should try and make things work as best as you possibly can. All of your effort should be on working with your husband or wife on growing deeper in love and in building your trust and respect for each other. You should work tirelessly on making the other happy.

But there are some instances where husbands and wives violate the bond of marriage by being unfaithful to their spouse. They hide the unfaithfulness and keep it a secret from their spouse. This is to be expected, but I think it is the right of the cheated upon to find out the truth. In such cases I think that GPS tracking is completely within the rights of the spouse who is being cheated on in order to find out the truth about their spouse’s activities. It should not be used to stalk, or hunt, or harass. Only to find out the truth.

With that said, I also think that spouses should be up front about this type of thing with each other. Going into marriage they should make an agreement with one another that if ever the other in the relationship expects some form of infidelity then they have the right to do some covert GPS tracking.

In most normal circumstances I do think that most couples should adhere to the “mutually agreed upon” principle of spouse GPS tracking. This just makes a lot of sense to me and my understanding of how marriage should operate. Aside from suspected cheating, a spouse should never track their other just because they want to. This would be a violation of trust and the promises made to the other at the altar.

With all that said, there are a lot of cool things that couples can do if they decide to use GPS tracking together. Here is just a smattering:

Create An Environment of Safety
When you are separated from your spouse, GPS tracking is a great way to stay connected and help them feel safe. If they know where you are at any given moment they can provide a lot of support for you. If you get attacked, they can come to your assistance. If you get injured, they can find you without having to call you and have you give them directions. Also, if a natural disaster were to separate you from each other all you would need to do would be to check on their location via the GPS tracker that you have on them and you can find out exactly where they are and be reunited with them. GPS makes a ton of situations easier to cope with.

Be Able To Give Great Directions and Assistance
One situation that often occurs is getting lost. We find our self in a new place and our bearings get a little off. All of a sudden we find that we are in a neighbor we have never seen and don’t know how to get out. It might be late at night and we may be feeling our heart rate rise as we drive around looking for some type of help. Instead of having to spend hours working out of this situation all we need to do is call our spouse. They can find out our exact GPS location and plug that into a mapping software like GoogleMaps. They then could give us turn by turn directions on our way home and out of our scary predicament.

Wouldn’t that be neat?

Get Fit Together
One of the most common things that spouses try and do together is get fit. GPS tracking can help spouses keep each other accountable even if they don’t have a schedule that lets them workout together. Just do your daily run, hike, or bike with your GPS tracking device and some free GPS fitness software and you can have a detailed log of your spouses fitness activity. If you go all out and buy a device like a GPS running watch it will let you even share your workouts between devices. If you want to keep pace with each other and you own a GPS watch like the Garmin Forerunner 405 then you can use the virtual partner feature on this device and even “race” against your spouse’s recorded time!

Spouse GPS Tracking Devices

Probably the best way for spouses to track each other with GPS is through the cell phone. There are dozens of free cell phone tracking applications out on the market that will make your tracking very cheap if not entirely free. While these cell phone programs do require a GPS enabled cell phone and a pretty big data plan if you want to have continuous real time tracking, they do provide stellar results given the price for the software (free!). If you don’t already have a GPS cell phone and you don’t have a data plan, it is still probably the cheapest form of GPS tracking out there right now. You can see our list of free GPS tracking software and cell phone applications for more information and phone compatibility.

If you don’t want to go with a cell phone to track your spouse with GPS there are stand alone device that you can use, but these are often much more expensive and simply not as useful as a cell phone. They might be necessary if you want to do covert GPS tracking on your spouse, but most people aren’t going to need to tracking their spouses in this way.