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How often does someone carrying out a planned crime carry a phone with them that is switched on, these days? Use of mobile phone data by the police has been standard practice since 2001, at least, and widely publicised.
All the time.
...because no case has ever been so righteously pursued, with such a vigorous degree of righteous indignation, that an innocent person was ever thrown in prison[0], yeah?
This blasé attitude about sweeping-up data of innocent people is precisely how you arrive at it eventually being abused.
The eroding of rights isn't a flagrantly giant leap but tiny concessions that occur until it's too late to reverse what has essentially become the modus operandi.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Safe from Google and Apple but not from cell tower triangulation.
Well yeah, you can be followed by a guy in a trenchcoat too, no matter what your phone's privacy settings are.
The difference between cell tower triangulation, and being followed by a guy in a trenchcoat is not.
In fact, there's a number of categorical differences between the first two, and the third.
1. The first two are automated. 2. The first two are recorded in a computer-searchable database. 3. The first two, by nature, are capable of scaling to encompass every cell-phone owner.
You're not going to get the 'set a spook to follow people' approach to accomplish any one of these.
The guesses were that on average every german phone is identified multiple times per year during this procedure. According to the Berlin statistics from 2017 there were nearly 450 requests resulting is 60 Million returned phones. Just compare that to Berlin's population...
this article convinced me to never use an Android phone nor Google maps ever again,
Hell, they don't even wait for a search warrant, they'll sell it to anyone who pays. [2]
You are carrying a tracking device that is constantly broadcasting your location to anyone that will listen, for Pete's sake. What, you expect that the recipients of your location will not turn it over, in response to a valid search warrant?
[1] https://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2011-03/data-protect...
[2] https://9to5mac.com/2019/02/07/wireless-carriers-selling-loc...
Why did the police ask Google, and not the cellular operators? They know who was where to the level of positioning detail this requires.
In Germany the "Funkzellenabfrage" ("reverse location" request by cell) provided by the providers is used quite often. On the last Chaos Communication Congress there was a talk about this and the police uses it quite frequently. The guesses were that on average every german phone is identified multiple times per year during this procedure. According to the Berlin statistics from 2017 there were nearly 450 requests re…
So essentially they asked for anonymised lists of phones (i.e. not even the actual numbers) that had been in the locations where the suspects had been, then cross-referenced these to find potential suspects, presumably finding some phones that exactly matched the reported movements of the suspects which they then made a second application to de-anonymise. Do people honestly think this is disproportionate for investig…
The scale of the search[0] is grossly disproportionate, to be sure. The population of the city in question was 60,797+[1] almost ten years ago.
So, we have a wide-net around the house, a period of about six hours requested, and if that main road is a major artery for driving, then we can safely assume (if it's day-time time-frame) that at least a small-to-medium-size portion of the population would've been simply driving by.
Now, for the St. Paul Food Market, they wanted 33 hours' worth of data and that is off of two main drags (it looks like). Given Google's overestimation of its ability to place a device at a location (noted in the article) and the potential of the predominance of the population to have driven in that area (let's say business day versus weekend); then, yeah, that does seem grossly disproportionate for investigating a robbery of a home invasion, and/or markets; especially considering that the markets weren't hit multiple times over that time-frame - they just wanted to see patterns of travel for everyone in the area over that period of time.
>What would have been a better way to investigate this crime?
The original police-work methods they were using, which they admitted in their court-filings as having actually led to the suspects? The confidential informant being chief amond those, yeah?
Touting this method as being a more useful mechanism for investigation, when that was countermanded by the evidence of the events - as told in the article, is disingenuous - at best.
[0] - https://img.apmcdn.org/170e8a92a0f2ddb41b4a415707a8e4db547af...
