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The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

theguardian.com

31–40 of 327 posts

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#31

it will end up as a cat and mouse game surely poeple who are up to no good, would just turn off their phone - possibly taking the battery out or placing it in a foiled bag. or give it to another person or even hide it somewhere else doesn't seem very hard to circumvent

The vast, vast majority of criminals are too dumb to do any of that.

The ones that get caught, at least. I worry that availability bias makes it hard to know what "true" crime looks like, so we end up chasing the wrong things.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#32
post #5

Is there a self hosted app to track your location? I use Google maps to keep granular history so I can use it later for whatever. But if I could self host that’d be better.

There's Trackbook for Android. It records locally to a GPX file and also has the option to use GPS only. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.y20k.trackbook/ https://github.com/y20k/trackbook

Anything on Android is totally moot. You can "turn off locations" but you don't know if it has. It also has a dozen other ways to track you when correlated with others, such as inertial, wifi, cell cgi, audio, magnetic, bluetooth, optical, pressure, etc; some of which are in the baseband and inaccessible to the OS. You can keep it in a faraday bag but it can still record and upload later.

Same thing could be said about IOS with the additional constraint that the vendor can do whatever it wants and we don't know what it's actually doing.

If you care about privacy just don't carry a phone.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#33
post #29
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That does practically nothing for your privacy, because you're still connected to the base station tower which keeps logs of your phone roaming between base stations. And in more populated areas, the base stations are dense enough to be pretty accurate about where you were. Requests for cell tower log dumps are very common these days. The solution here is for governments to ban this kind of bulk data requests without…

Disclaimer: I'm a Googler, but thankfully not dealing with any of this. Well, it won't stop the police. But the accuracy is lower, increasing the number of people that match the geofence. That changes the cost-benefit of asking for such a warrant.

It might be just my eastern european paranoia, but this just makes it easier for the authorities to put you into a place they want you to be, not harder.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#34

it will end up as a cat and mouse game surely poeple who are up to no good, would just turn off their phone - possibly taking the battery out or placing it in a foiled bag. or give it to another person or even hide it somewhere else doesn't seem very hard to circumvent

The issue is if you're doing something illegal that you don't know are illegal, but are one of the small number of people in the geofenced area. We don't even have to be guilty, the police just have to _think_ you are guilty for them to make you have a bad day.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#35

Its only a matter of time before the wrong people get their hands on all the data that big tech has been unscrupulously mining for years now. An authoritarian's wet dream. Im typically a minimal regulation kind of guy but these orgs have consistently demonstrated that without some sort of effective privacy regulation, modern tech companies simply do not have enough incentive to self-regulate with respect to data coll…

Data brokers have been building detailed personal profiles of everyone for fifty years. The Googles are just the new kids at the party. A major reason we don't have strong data privacy law is to protect this business model and maintain the surveillance apparatus it enables.

I think there are generic non-surveillance reasons as well. Whenever an industry gets big enough (tobacco, oil, advertising) it can have enough momentum and capital to have its interests protected by the state to a degree that anything short of an energized mass movement will fail to see these industries regulated (a good example of such a movement having some success is tobacco.)

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#36

Its only a matter of time before the wrong people get their hands on all the data that big tech has been unscrupulously mining for years now. An authoritarian's wet dream. Im typically a minimal regulation kind of guy but these orgs have consistently demonstrated that without some sort of effective privacy regulation, modern tech companies simply do not have enough incentive to self-regulate with respect to data coll…

already happened/Happens.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#37

Its only a matter of time before the wrong people get their hands on all the data that big tech has been unscrupulously mining for years now. An authoritarian's wet dream. Im typically a minimal regulation kind of guy but these orgs have consistently demonstrated that without some sort of effective privacy regulation, modern tech companies simply do not have enough incentive to self-regulate with respect to data coll…

Data brokers have been building detailed personal profiles of everyone for fifty years. The Googles are just the new kids at the party. A major reason we don't have strong data privacy law is to protect this business model and maintain the surveillance apparatus it enables.

Most people don't know the names of the worst offenders.

Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

#38

Its only a matter of time before the wrong people get their hands on all the data that big tech has been unscrupulously mining for years now. An authoritarian's wet dream. Im typically a minimal regulation kind of guy but these orgs have consistently demonstrated that without some sort of effective privacy regulation, modern tech companies simply do not have enough incentive to self-regulate with respect to data coll…

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