Tuck a tracker the size of a bottle cap under somebody’s bumper, or zip one into the lining of her purse, and in Minnesota you’ve committed a crime. Most people assume that’s true no matter who planted it.
It isn’t. Minnesota’s tracking-device statute has, as I read it, exactly one way out for a private person, and it runs through the owner. In October 2011 the Court of Appeals reversed the conviction of a husband whose tracking device turned up magnetically stuck under the car his wife drove, because he was an owner of that car too. The same court, in the same opinion, affirmed his stalking conviction for the same device.
So if you’re asking whether the person who tracked you broke the law, you’re asking the wrong statute. There are two, and they don’t care about the same things.
What does Minnesota’s tracking-device law actually say?
It’s short, and the tracking-device language dates to 1989. Tracking devices share a sentence with pen registers and trap-and-trace devices, which is why it reads like a wiretap statute:
Except as provided in this section, no person may install or use a pen register, trap and trace device, or mobile tracking device without first obtaining a court order under section 626A.37.
— Minn. Stat. § 626A.35, subd. 1
“Mobile tracking device” is defined broadly enough to cover the gadgets people actually use: “an electronic or mechanical device that permits the tracking of the movement of a person or object.” § 626A.39, subd. 5. An AirTag qualifies. So does a hardwired cellular GPS unit. A phone with location sharing quietly switched on is a harder question. I’d argue it’s covered too.
Now notice the escape hatch in subdivision 1: get a court order under § 626A.37. You can’t. Only “[a]n investigative or law enforcement officer with responsibility for an ongoing criminal investigation may make application” for one. § 626A.36, subd. 1. A suspicious spouse isn’t on the list. Neither is a private investigator.
That leaves the exception that actually matters to anybody who isn’t a cop:
The prohibition of subdivision 1 does not apply to the use of a mobile tracking device where the consent of the owner of the object to which the mobile tracking device is to be attached has been obtained.
— Minn. Stat. § 626A.35, subd. 2a
Break the rule knowingly and you’re looking at a gross misdemeanor. “Whoever knowingly violates subdivision 1 shall be fined not more than $3,000 or imprisoned not more than 364 days, or both.” § 626A.35, subd. 3. In Minnesota a felony is a crime punishable by a year or more, a misdemeanor tops out at 90 days or $1,000, and a gross misdemeanor is anything in between, with a fine ceiling of $3,000. § 609.02, subds. 2–4. Until 2023 the jail number read “one year”. The Legislature told the Revisor to substitute “364 days” for “one year” across the statutes that year, 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 52, art. 6, § 16, and this section got swept along with everything else.
Your car, your consent. Their car, their crime.
The easy cases are easy. An ex-boyfriend who never owned your car and drops an AirTag in the wheel well needs your consent, doesn’t have it, and has no court order. An AirTag slipped into your backpack is attached to an object you own. Same answer.
And the statute does more than make it a crime. Buried a few sections later is a civil action most people have never heard of:
A person who is harmed by a violation of sections 626A.35 to 626A.39 may bring a civil action against the person who violated these sections for damages and other appropriate relief, including:
(1) preliminary and equitable or declaratory relief; and
(2) reasonable costs and attorney fees.
— Minn. Stat. § 626A.391, subd. 1
Attorney fees. That matters, because tracking cases rarely come with big medical bills, and fee-shifting is what makes a modest claim worth bringing. The clock is two years, measured from “the occurrence of the violation” or “the date upon which the claimant first had a reasonable opportunity to discover the violation.” § 626A.391, subd. 2.
One honest limit. On the wiretap side of the same chapter, in most interception cases a court may assess statutory damages of the greater of “$100 a day for each day of violation or $10,000.” § 626A.13, subd. 3(b)(2). The tracking section has nothing like that. You prove what the tracking actually cost you.
And one open question the courts have flagged and left alone. In the 2011 case I’m about to walk through, the Court of Appeals observed in a footnote that the tracking-device provisions “focus on prohibiting their improper use by law enforcement”, but that “the statutes do not exempt improper use by individuals.” Then: “The parties have not addressed the reach of the statutes, and we do not consider the question.” State v. Hormann, 805 N.W.2d 883, 892 n.2 (Minn. Ct. App. 2011). The text says “no person”. I read that to mean what it says. No appellate court has squarely held it yet that I found.
The husband who owned the car he tracked
Here’s the case that makes this statute interesting.
In March 2010, a woman in Douglas County had a mechanic check her car for a tracker. He found one, “magnetically attached to the underside of the car.” Hormann, 805 N.W.2d at 886. The complaint said police traced the purchase to her husband. The car was registered to her alone. She’d told him in October 2008 that she intended to divorce him, and, as the court recounted her testimony, he “always seemed to know where she had been after she used the car.” Id. at 887. A jury convicted him of stalking and of the tracking-device crime.
The Court of Appeals reversed the tracking-device conviction. Id. at 894–95.
The court started with the word “owner”. Section 626A.35 doesn’t define it, and the court called it “ambiguous” because the phrase “the owner” seems to assume an object has only one. Id. at 893. So it borrowed the definition from the vehicle-title statutes, which define an owner as “a person, other than a secured party, having the property in or title to a vehicle”, including a person entitled to the use and possession of a vehicle subject to a security interest in another person. § 168A.01, subd. 13. “Nothing limits ownership to only one person.” Hormann, 805 N.W.2d at 893.
Then marriage did the rest. The couple bought the car with marital funds, the state never rebutted the marital presumption, and he’d driven it on occasion. Id. at 893–94. She’d also signed the title over to him in June 2009 to help a sale that fell through, and the transfer was never recorded. Id. at 894. Ambiguity in a criminal statute goes to the defendant under the rule of lenity, so the court held “that the statutory exception applies when the vehicle or object to which the tracking device is attached has multiple owners, one of whom has consented to the tracking device.” Id. And then the line that ends the argument:
Finally, we note that the statute does not criminalize an owner’s attaching such a device to a vehicle in which he has an ownership interest. That would be absurd.
— Hormann, 805 N.W.2d at 894
So a co-owner consents for himself. The Minnesota Supreme Court denied review on January 17, 2012.
Does every Minnesota spouse “own” the other spouse’s car?
Not automatically, and Hormann doesn’t say so. The court rested on two facts together: the car was presumptively marital, and the title had been signed over to him. Id. at 894–95. Take away the signed title and you’ve got a closer case.
But the marital half is broad. Under the dissolution statute, “[a]ll property acquired by either spouse subsequent to the marriage and before the valuation date is presumed to be marital property regardless of whether title is held individually or by the spouses in a form of co-ownership”. § 518.003, subd. 3b. Her name alone on the title didn’t make it her car alone. The presumption can be overcome by showing the property is nonmarital, id., a car bought before the wedding or given to one spouse by a parent, for instance, and the state in Hormann never tried.
Since that decision, the Legislature has come back to § 626A.35 twice. In 2023 it added an exception letting police track a stolen car, 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 52, art. 9, § 11, and in 2025 it rewrote that exception and added another for fleeing vehicles, 2025 Minn. Laws ch. 35, art. 5, §§ 24–25. That’s two sessions spent writing GPS rules for squad cars. The sentence about the owner’s consent hasn’t moved. If St. Paul thinks a spouse shouldn’t be able to track the family car through a divorce, it’s had since October 2011 to say so.
The stalking statute doesn’t care whose car it is
This is the half people miss. The tracking count fell, and the stalking conviction stood, on the same device and the same car. Hormann, 805 N.W.2d at 894–95.
Minnesota’s harassment statute has reached electronic tracking since 2005, when the Legislature amended it to cover anyone who “monitors” another “whether in person or through technological or other means”. 2005 Minn. Laws ch. 136, art. 17, § 46. Today’s version lists, as an act of harassment, when a person:
(2) follows, monitors, or pursues another, whether in person or through any available technological or other means;
— Minn. Stat. § 609.749, subd. 2(c)(2)
Search the section for the word “owner”. It isn’t there. Title, marital interest, whose name is on the registration: none of it is an element.
What it does require is intent and effect. The act becomes a gross misdemeanor only if the person acted “with the intent to kill, injure, harass, or intimidate another person” and, in doing so, places the other person in reasonable fear of substantial bodily harm, places her in reasonable fear that her family or household members will be subject to substantial bodily harm, or “causes or would reasonably be expected to cause substantial emotional distress to the other person.” § 609.749, subd. 2(b). The statute defines that distress with examples, including “losing sleep or appetite” and “having difficulty concentrating on tasks resulting in a loss of productivity.” Id., subd. 2(a)(4).
A pattern makes it a felony. “Stalking” under subdivision 5 means “two or more acts within a five-year period” that violate the section or a list of other crimes, and when the actor “knows or has reason to know” the conduct “would cause the victim under the circumstances to feel terrorized or to fear bodily harm” and it does, the maximum is ten years or a $20,000 fine, or both. § 609.749, subd. 5(a)–(b).
There’s an exception for conduct “authorized or required by a valid contract” or done “to carry out a specific lawful commercial purpose or employment duty”. § 609.749, subd. 7. That’s the door a lender or a fleet owner walks through. It isn’t a door for a jealous spouse.
The 2010 complaint in Hormann was charged under an older version of the statute that required proof the victim felt “frightened, threatened, oppressed, persecuted, or intimidated”. 805 N.W.2d at 889. The Legislature rewrote the structure in 2020, adding the intent-and-effect elements. 2020 Minn. Laws ch. 96. The monitoring clause came through that rewrite unchanged.
What can you do about it besides call the police?
Three tools, and they stack.
A restraining order. Minnesota’s harassment restraining order covers “repeated incidents of intrusive or unwanted acts, words, or gestures that have a substantial adverse effect or are intended to have a substantial adverse effect on the safety, security, or privacy of another, regardless of the relationship between the actor and the intended target”. § 609.748, subd. 1(a)(1). I covered how that order works, and why it’s the one that doesn’t ask who the person is to you, at /news/minnesota-harassment-restraining-orders/. If the person tracking you is a spouse, an order for protection may also be on the table, but it requires “domestic abuse” as § 518B.01, subd. 2(a) defines it, and stalking isn’t on that list by name. Tracking alone fits it, as I read the statute, only if it inflicts fear of imminent physical harm, bodily injury, or assault. I compared the two orders at /news/minnesota-order-for-protection-vs-hro/.
The § 626A.391 civil action, where the person who planted the device doesn’t own the thing it was stuck to. Fees are recoverable. See above.
The intrusion tort, which as I read it reaches a co-owner too, because nothing in it turns on title. Minnesota recognized intrusion upon seclusion in 1998, and Lake v. Wal-Mart described it in the Restatement’s words: it occurs when one “intentionally intrudes, physically or otherwise, upon the solitude or seclusion of another or his private affairs or concerns * * * if the intrusion would be highly offensive to a reasonable person.” Lake v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 582 N.W.2d 231, 233, 235 (Minn. 1998). I wrote up what Lake decided and how later cases narrowed it at /news/minnesota-invasion-of-privacy-tort/. I didn’t find a Minnesota appellate decision applying intrusion upon seclusion to a hidden GPS tracker. I searched CourtListener several ways, and it has real gaps for Minnesota and indexes no district court files. So whether a Minnesota court calls weeks of covert tracking “highly offensive” is, as far as I can see, still open.
If the tracker came with a recorder, or you found spyware on your phone, you’re in a different statute entirely, with different consent rules. That’s at /news/minnesota-surveillance-recording-consent/. And when it’s the government doing the tracking, a separate warrant statute governs, which I covered at /news/chatrie-geofence-warrants-minnesota-got-there-first/.
Your phone may warn you. It may not.
Apple and Google built a joint specification, “Detecting Unwanted Location Trackers”, and turned it on in May 2024, so that an iPhone or Android phone can warn you about somebody else’s tracker regardless of which platform the tracker is paired with. In Apple’s words, users “get an ‘[Item] Found Moving With You’ alert on their device if an unknown Bluetooth tracking device is seen moving with them over time”. Apple Newsroom, May 13, 2024.
Read the qualifiers before you relax. The specification covers Bluetooth trackers. A cellular GPS unit wired into your car’s fuse box isn’t what it was built to find. The alert takes time, since the tracker has to be seen moving with you “over time”. Apple’s support page also tells you that “[i]f your device is in Airplane Mode, you won’t receive tracking notifications”, and that compatible third-party trackers need iOS 17.5 or later. Apple Support, “What to do if you get an alert that an AirTag … is with you” (published Sept. 24, 2026).
If you do find an AirTag, Apple says tapping it with an NFC-capable phone opens a page showing “its serial number and the last four digits of the phone number of the person who registered it”, and suggests you “take a screenshot to make sure that you can document the information.” Id. Do that before you disable anything. Apple also says that if a device “is discovered to be unlawfully tracking a person, law enforcement can request any available information from Apple to support their investigation.” Id. That serial number is how an anonymous gadget turns into a name.
Whoever stuck it there, the device is evidence. Don’t toss it in the lake.
Madgett Law, LLC
Madgett Law, LLC handles Minnesota privacy claims arising from surveillance, including the common-law privacy torts recognized in Lake v. Wal-Mart Stores, and represents petitioners and respondents in harassment restraining order and order for protection proceedings. You can read more on our Identity Theft & Data Protection page. If you’ve found a tracker you didn’t put there, or you’re the one being accused of planting it, send us a message.
Sources: Minn. Stat. § 626A.35, subd. 1 (prohibition; court order under § 626A.37), subd. 2a (owner-consent exception), subd. 2b (stolen-vehicle exception), subd. 2c (fleeing-vehicle exception), subd. 3 (penalty); 1989 Minn. Laws ch. 336, art. 1, § 8 (adding mobile tracking devices and subd. 2a); 2023 Minn. Laws ch. 52, art. 6, § 16 (revisor instruction substituting “364 days” for “one year”), art. 9, § 11 (adding § 626A.35, subd. 2b); 2025 Minn. Laws ch. 35, art. 5, § 24 (amending subd. 2b), § 25 (adding subd. 2c); Minn. Stat. § 626A.36, subd. 1 (who may apply for an order); § 626A.37, subd. 1 (issuance of order); § 626A.39, subd. 5 (mobile tracking device defined); § 626A.391, subd. 1 (civil action; costs and attorney fees), subd. 2 (two-year limitation); § 626A.13, subd. 3(b)(2) (statutory damages for interception); Minn. Stat. § 609.02, subd. 4 (gross misdemeanor; $3,000 maximum fine); Minn. Stat. § 609.749, subd. 2(a)(4) (substantial emotional distress defined), subd. 2(b) (intent and effect elements), subd. 2(c)(2) (follows, monitors, or pursues), subd. 5(a)–(b) (felony stalking; two or more acts within five years), subd. 7 (exception); 2005 Minn. Laws ch. 136, art. 17, § 46 (adding “monitors” and “technological or other means”; effective Aug. 1, 2005); 2020 Minn. Laws ch. 96; Minn. Stat. § 609.748, subd. 1(a)(1) (harassment defined for restraining orders); Minn. Stat. § 518B.01, subd. 2(a) (domestic abuse defined); Minn. Stat. § 518.003, subd. 3b (marital property presumption); Minn. Stat. § 168A.01, subd. 13 (owner defined); State v. Hormann, 805 N.W.2d 883, 886–87 (facts), 889 (pre-2020 stalking definition), 892 & n.2 (owner-consent exception; reach of statute not decided), 893 (ambiguity; § 168A.01 definition; multiple owners; marital presumption), 894 (title; rule of lenity; holding; “That would be absurd”), 894–95 (reversal of tracking-device conviction; stalking conviction affirmed) (Minn. Ct. App. 2011), review denied (Minn. Jan. 17, 2012); Lake v. Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 582 N.W.2d 231, 233 (Restatement formulation of intrusion upon seclusion), 235 (recognition of the tort) (Minn. 1998); Apple Newsroom, “Apple and Google deliver support for unwanted tracking alerts in iOS and Android” (May 13, 2024); Apple Support, “What to do if you get an alert that an AirTag, set of AirPods, Find My network accessory, or compatible Bluetooth location-tracking device is with you” (published Sept. 24, 2026). This article is general information about Minnesota law, not legal advice. Reading it does not create an attorney–client relationship, and no outcome is promised or implied.