I went reading about the device after seeing the story.
Admittedly, I assumed mountainbikes as it was posted in UKGE, but these look great for organised thieves.
The specific box is relatively expensive actual security kit, and properly weatherproof. It can also stay live for 2mo – a year on one battery charge. It does basically nothing til someone calls it from a mobile. Then it polls location and texts back longitude, latitude and speed in a format that apparently will launch Google maps if you receive it on a smart phone. It’s a locator not a tracker. It does have a few other abilities if configured but they’d be useful for keeping stuff where you put it not finding someone else’s.
Quite agree that these now would be a better idea than tailing someone. As posted, the thieves could lurk in sight of a car park at Trail centre, note the vehicles with more interesting bikes, tag the vehicles once riders riding, then do something else for the rest of the day. Once they’ve got all the locations sussed, they can hit the houses at will. With several tags to use at once it’s far more efficient than individually following vehicles. It also as suggested opens up options of finding people’s vans while on a riding holiday, when vehicles don’t live at registered address etc. Plus you don’t leave search metadata for looking up registration details.
I imagine it’s only a real worry to people with much newer nicer bikes than mine, but I certainly wouldn’t discount these type of geolocators. I’d certainly be interested in them if I was a thief.