31–40 of 166 posts
Wow that's deeply disturbing but also feels like a similar tactic to the stingrays. Does simply owning a cell phone and being in a geographical area make you open to 4th amendment search and identification?
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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…
CCTVs don't invade my privacy by opening up my entire digital life to the police, including conversations and pictures that have nothing to do with the crime scene. It's completely different.
Well, neither do the sorts of warrant mentioned in the article. They don't even get phone numbers, just arbitrary phone IDs and where they were located to be inside the region.
If they were scooping up everyone's digital fingerprints en masse without probable cause and without a warrant, then that's something else entirely, but that didn't happen here.
Stop using Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc if you care about privacy!
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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.
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.
Wow that's deeply disturbing but also feels like a similar tactic to the stingrays. Does simply owning a cell phone and being in a geographical area make you open to 4th amendment search and identification?
Hasn't it been shown that the 4th doesn't apply to information you give to someone else? They are requesting this from Google, not you, so your 4th amendment rights don't matter. I don't necessarily agree with that ruling, but as far as I know that's the current state of things.
There's actually a court case at SCOTUS that may more closely define what is and isn't covered by the 3rd party doctrine when it comes to phones.
http://www.scotusblog.com/2017/08/symposium-will-fourth-amen...
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…
Anyway, you might be interested in Carpenter v United States, which is testing the third-party doctrine in front of the Supreme Court and will be decided soon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
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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.
> The due process required by the 4th amendment is performed when the court issues a warrant, which they did here
The warrant was to search Google's servers, not the potential suspects' phones. What I'm saying is that I believe this data is logically part of the phone despite the fact that it resides on Google's servers because of the way that Google chose to implement their services. If they want to get a warrant for a specific person's phone because they believe the location information in the phone will prove that the suspect was in the area, that's different. But fishing for suspects using location data feels wrong to me. For one, it is almost guaranteed to also cover innocent people. Unless it's a remote area where only the perpetrator and victim were present, someone innocent will get unnecessarily dragged into the investigation.
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.
Did I make mistakes in the above paragraph? Probably. But you know what, that's Google's fault, because it sure isn't clear what they aren't and are doing, who can and can't use it, and what I can can't opt out of.
That's the really frustrating part, here. It's purposely obfuscated and changing - similar to Facebook's privacy settings - to keep you on your toes even if you are in the tiny percentage of the population that actually cares. Most won't until something panicky / headliney happens to make them care. I'm kind of glad the EU is making life tough for American tech companies with regards to privacy (even though I work for American tech companies).