By Hannah Hess | Virginia Statehouse News

RICHMOND — As technology advances and Virginia scrambles to keep pace, health-care professionals at AD Williams Memorial Clinic here are worried lawmakers will get tangled in family medical decisions.

Virginia lawmakers want to make it illegal to track people without their consent. The move aims to stop unauthorized tracking using personal data collected by cellphone navigation or other GPS systems.

House Bill 805, sponsored by Delegate Joe May, R-Loudoun County, would exempt people with Alzheimer’s disease. Caretakers could attach monitoring bracelets to track a patient who may be prone to wandering or getting lost because of the disease without getting the Alzheimer’s patient’s permission.

CT technologist Leishia Parker, 50, of Prince George County, said lawmakers should stop trying to craft policy related to family issues. Since 1982, Parker has worked with incapacitated adults, including Alzheimer’s patients.

“I don’t think that all Alzheimer’s patients need a monitoring device,” she said. “That’s a family issue.”

Nurse Jim McCumiskey, 34, of Henrico County, agreed.

“I think it’s a family decision,” he said Thursday. “If you feel your family member needs more independence, (a tracking bracelet) might give them the freedom to do that.”

The family could bring up the issue to a doctor, he said, and together decide what works best in each situation.

Lawmakers could debate those issues as early as Friday. The bill sailed through a House Technology Committee in a 20-2 vote Wednesday.

“It’s important to make sure you are respecting personal freedoms,” said Delegate Vivian Watts, D-Fairfax, one of the 20 lawmakers who endorsed the bill.

She said she believes May slowly crafted the bill to make careful exemptions for Alzheimer’s patients, parents tracking their kids, telecommunications companies like OnStar and cellphone providers.

But Democrats and advocates of personal freedom worry the bill will have overreaching or unintended effects on personal freedoms.

Delegate Scott Surovell, D-Fairfax, and House Minority Leader David Toscano, D-Charlottesville, voted against the bill.

“Criminalizing GPS tracking is OK,” Surovell said, “but there’s a difference between tracking a person and tracking your property.”

Surovell said the au pair who cares for his four children sometimes drives his personal car. He wants to be able to put a tracking device on it, because he feels “entitled to know what someone is doing with my car or my kids.”

The bill would allow Surovell to track his nanny when she is driving his children in his car, but Surovell said a lawyer could interpret the exemption differently.

“The government has no right to tell me that I can’t put a tracking device on my car,” Surovell said Thursday.

Watts said lawmakers “tried to focus on the family and those things that are important to Virginia.”

The Alzheimer’s exception is necessary for the families of the “dear, sweet people” afflicted by the disease, she said.

Virginia families may want to keep their aging grandparents at home, Watts said, rather than in a nursing home, but they still need to keep track of their whereabouts. 

She said she does not know anyone with Alzheimer’s, but nursing homes and senior citizens comprise a large part of her Northern Virginia constituency.

Delegates could debate the bill on the House floor as early as Friday.

Read the bill: http://lis.virginia.gov/cgi-bin/legp604.exe?121+ful+HB807H1+pdf

Watch an interview with Parker: http://youtu.be/pnR1GSrpfX8