181–190 of 256 posts
Every time I see one of these I'm validated in my decision to switch to Apple.
Your mobile provider will be just as helpful with law enforcement. They've been selling your location data for a long time.
> He noted that even if it did target the wrong person, "it doesn't mean they're going to get convicted or arrested, it just gives the detective a look at who could be involved." ...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 preci…
The risk of a false positive is nonzero, but how does it balance against the value of a true-negative? Given that alternatives the police have include "picking up anyone who just looks like they might be a perpetrator" (which all too often translates to racist policing), is there value to communities (especially communities with past racial policing concerns) of tools that tell the cops it's probably not any of the p…
Do you mean a miss?
Misses are unavoidable. If the perpetrator didn't have their phone on them, this is not going to help a bit. However invasive your investigative powers are, there will always remain a chance of misses. The question is how much privacy and freedom of innocents you want to sacrifice for a small further decrease of miss chance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always find comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four to be a [small] part of the problem. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, mass surveillance is allowed to exist because of the application of force (torture and murder). It's a dystopia founded in violence and oppression. We like to think things are like the book, because it paints us as victims. However, the truth is that, at best, we're complicit. This reality is explored in th…
Or, in many cases, people have done the mental calculus between free, powerful, entertaining services and their privacy rights and have chosen the former.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I always find comparisons to Nineteen Eighty-Four to be a [small] part of the problem. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, mass surveillance is allowed to exist because of the application of force (torture and murder). It's a dystopia founded in violence and oppression. We like to think things are like the book, because it paints us as victims. However, the truth is that, at best, we're complicit. This reality is explored in th…
Or, in many cases, people have done the mental calculus between free, powerful, entertaining services and their privacy rights and have chosen the former.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So, send phone on trip to "prove" I wasn't somewhere else; put it in my kids backpack, fix it under my neighbours car.
So you put it in your kid's backpack and later the police will see that you spent your day in an elementary school. Does not seem like a very good alibi. The same is true for your neighbor, they will see that you spent your day in the parking lot of your neighbor's workplace, pretty suspicious.
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…
Do people honestly think this is disproportionate for investigating a home invasion? I think the concern is not Google sharing this data once they have it. The concern is Google having it, in the first place (in personally identifiable form). There's a lot of unclarity about which free and paid Google services and products are and aren't tracked. Who knows if their DNS resolver or their wifi-visibility-to-phone-locat…
> He noted that even if it did target the wrong person, "it doesn't mean they're going to get convicted or arrested, it just gives the detective a look at who could be involved." ...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 preci…
It's 1984 kafkaesque. The slowly-boiled frog deserves neither liberty nor safety. What the naïve fools don't grasp is anything they do or any information about them can be used to target them for arbitrary or deliberate police or political purposes. Oh and then there's the peer-pressure gaslighting of anyone pushing back on the "nothing to hide" mantra or pantopticon surveillance state. Ask them to live in glass hous…
1. Histrionic comparison to a dystopian novel.
2. Calling people who disagree with you "naive fools".
3. Evoking this category of "nothing to hide" strawmen.
This information can only be attained by a warrant, and doesn't change the fact that you are tried before a judge, by a jury of your peers. Furthermore, Police are funded by local governments with locally elected officials, so they are eventually bound by the public. If you are to any degree right, you haven't explained how this data could be used to undermine, circumvent, or influence these factors and bring about a 'surveillance state'. At this point you're just fear mongering.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If your train of logic basically reaches the conclusion "police cannot legally investigate crimes," I'm afraid I have some bad news about the facts underpinning your train of logic, because society will not conclude crimes can no longer be investigated.
Good news! The train of logic doesn't do that! Traditional methods are just fine. Some technological methods are fine, others are not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The risk of a false positive is nonzero, but how does it balance against the value of a true-negative? Given that alternatives the police have include "picking up anyone who just looks like they might be a perpetrator" (which all too often translates to racist policing), is there value to communities (especially communities with past racial policing concerns) of tools that tell the cops it's probably not any of the p…
> The risk of a false positive is nonzero, but how does it balance against the value of a true-negative? Do you mean a miss? Misses are unavoidable. If the perpetrator didn't have their phone on them, this is not going to help a bit. However invasive your investigative powers are, there will always remain a chance of misses. The question is how much privacy and freedom of innocents you want to sacrifice for a small f…
That'll be great news for the suspect in question if it's the black guy the cops picked up using "traditional" policing methods because he looks like he was in the wrong neighborhood.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The additional search areas limit the potential for collateral intrusion though, because they are essentially going to be ANDed with the list from the main crime scene not ORed. Even if the whole town visited those markets, it could never be more intrusive. Also, the reasonably wide rectangle is precisely because the location data is not particularly accurate, I am not sure why you think this supports the idea that i…
you familiar with this ? The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. Pretty sure "grab that pile of anonymous bits" isnt a proper d…