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To find suspects, police quietly turn to Google

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Re: To find suspects, police quietly turn to Google

#21

Post by ribosometronome »

cornholio wrote: post #19

In principle and with some caveats, I support this use of tracking information: it's usually quite specific, it has a very positive efect for law enforcement, it's not a breach of fundamental rights of the suspect as confirmation of the physical location at a certain time is not secret and can be obtained by the police from CCTV cameras, eyewitnesses etc. The privacy of the bystanders is not significantly reduced if…

I don't know if I really understand your argument. You're justifying this by comparing it to CCTVs and eyewitnesses, but there isn't really any expectation that CCTVs and eyewitnesses respect the privacy of bystanders or limits on reviewing CCTV data or receiving reports of crimes from eyewitnesses in most areas.

Which isn't to say that I think we should allow limitless collection but rather that, even while justifying it using CCTVs, you're still treating them differently. I'd wager that's because it is different.

Re: To find suspects, police quietly turn to Google

#22

Post by londons_explore »

danso wrote: post #2

This seems to me to be a major revelation: police in North Carolina have successfully requested Google account information on all phones near a crime scene. While Google routinely responds to search warrants, this is a much broader type of data request.

Arguably, this leaks everyones data. Anyone who was not in the area will be excluded from the list, therefore letting the police know where I wasn't at the time.

I wonder how Google show that on their transparency report? Hopefully "Accounts searched: 1.5 Billion"

Re: To find suspects, police quietly turn to Google

#23

Post by raverbashing »

stefan_ wrote: post #10
karmakaze wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way is to not use any Google services. If you connect from mobile IP ranges as other users who are in the area, you could also easily be included. Same goes for cell towers but at least it's not a single entity.

Google collects location data from WLAN networks in reach, triangulates from cell tower signal strength, GPS, GLONASS, geoip and if all that fails, sheer historical prediction. And no one quite knows why, other than "because we can". There is Google Maps, but when I'm not using it, when exactly is this orwellian infrastructure to my benefit and not exclusively Googles?

An it still gets some of it wrong. A lot of time

Re: To find suspects, police quietly turn to Google

#24

Post by londons_explore »

joering2 wrote: post #20

This is probably one of the cons of using VPN. If criminal used VPN service that you happen to use and connect to the same node, expect police to read your emails, courtesy of Google. I'm still in the process of getting off google mail and switching to Proton. It takes time to go thru all my google emails and clean them up. Yes I know deleting them won't change a thing BUT at least I consent to deleting them on my en…

Google guarantees to actually delete your emails 30 days after you delete them from your account.

The GDPR law in europe requires them to do this for european citizens.

Re: To find suspects, police quietly turn to Google

#26

Post by nkurz »

This is an important story, but a little difficult to summarize. Here's my attempt at an overview:

1. Google stores location history data for more of its mobile users than you might expect. The precision is greatest when GPS is on, but less precise data from cell towers and WiFi sources is used almost any time a Google app is being used on an Android or non-Android phone. There have been cases in the past where Google has recorded such information even when the user has explicitly turned off all location services, but Google says they have stopped this practice.

2. On multiple recent occasions, police in North Carolina have quietly been successful in obtaining search warrants that force Google to turn over these records. Rather than "standard" search warrants asking for the location of a particular suspect in a crime, these "reverse" or "area based" warrants ask for time and location data for all users who have entered a geographical area during a time of interest. The records returned are initially anonymous account numbers, and the police then make followup requests for identifying information of the subset of accounts that they think are of interest to the case.

3. This open-ended "drag net" approach scares some people. Typically, at least in the US, suspects are identified first, and then further information is gathered that confirms or removes the suspicion. The express fear seems to be that innocent people will be falsely accused due to coincidence, but there is also a more general fear that once mechanisms are in place that allow the police to have easy access to location tracking information, this information will end up being abused.

Re: To find suspects, police quietly turn to Google

#27

Post by olympus »

matthewmacleod wrote: post #16
dumbsite5692 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does absolutely nothing. If you don't want to be tracked, don't carry a phone. It's the only way.

I mean, it literally does things.

Don't act all snarky when someone says the only way not to be tracked is to not carry a phone. It's pretty close to being true, and you don't know if hitting the software switch to turn off your GPS really turns it off or if it goes into a low power mode where it only updates your position every five minutes- this is not unheard of to keep the time to fix low for when a person turns location services back on.

As mentioned in the article, Google was previously caught tracking people even when they had location, data, and Wi-Fi turned off. We just have to take their word now that they don't do it anymore, and the word of a big profit driven corporation that has been implicated in PRISM and previously tracked people isn't worth too much.

Furthermore, even if Google doesn't track you the cell phone companies still know which tower your cell phone was connected to, so they know your location within three miles at all times. It's not as precise as GPS info, but the police could still ask the cell phone companies to give them a list of phone accounts that were visible to a specific set of cell phone towers at a particular set of times.

Re: To find suspects, police quietly turn to Google

#28

Post by olympus »

londons_explore wrote: post #24
joering2 wrote: post #20

This is probably one of the cons of using VPN. If criminal used VPN service that you happen to use and connect to the same node, expect police to read your emails, courtesy of Google. I'm still in the process of getting off google mail and switching to Proton. It takes time to go thru all my google emails and clean them up. Yes I know deleting them won't change a thing BUT at least I consent to deleting them on my en…

Google guarantees to actually delete your emails 30 days after you delete them from your account. The GDPR law in europe requires them to do this for european citizens.

Does it guarantee to do this for everyone or just Europeans? Genuinely curious here since they might have separate policies in place for different countries- I imagine that China prefers to keep all its citizens' emails indefinitely.

Re: To find suspects, police quietly turn to Google

#29

Post by John_KZ »

izuchukwu wrote: post #13
stefan_ wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google collects location data from WLAN networks in reach, triangulates from cell tower signal strength, GPS, GLONASS, geoip and if all that fails, sheer historical prediction. And no one quite knows why, other than "because we can". There is Google Maps, but when I'm not using it, when exactly is this orwellian infrastructure to my benefit and not exclusively Googles?

“personalized search” While a true statement, it’s unfortunate how broad of a license it ultimately provides.

And the funny thing is that many of us don't even want personalized search.

Re: To find suspects, police quietly turn to Google

#30

Post by roywiggins »

curun1r wrote: post #15
roywiggins wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems morally similar to scooping up all CCTV from nearby businesses. If this is going through a warrant process, and it's geofenced around a specific crime they're investigating, it's hard to feel too worried about it. The worst case scenario I can see is that it makes it easy to generate false hypotheses and put innocent people under suspicion, but then so can canvassing the neighborhood and trawling all the nea…

CCTV is more analogous to a witness that provides a fixed point of view. Location data feels much closer to providing the point of view of the suspect and comes much closer, to my mind, to being protected by our 5th amendment rights to avoid self incrimination. Also, given that Google don't make it obvious when they're storing information in the phone or on their servers, information that intuitively feels like it's…

> 4th amendment's prohibitions on illegal searches.

The due process required by the 4th amendment is performed when the court issues a warrant, which they did here. If Google were providing this without a warrant, or in response to an NSL or the feds were using the 3rd-party doctrine to argue that these searches weren't protected by the 4th amendment then I'd be worried.

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