Phones are a liability.
Especially for criminals.
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The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
61–70 of 327 posts
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#624 layers of Aluminium foil :-)) https://youtu.be/tVFJJEiJ1C0
During school some friends and I lived above our landlord who prohibited Wi-Fi, saying it gave him headaches. One time I accidentally used the Wi-Fi adapter for my Xbox 360, and he came up a half hour later with a sniffer demanding us to shut off the source. Never figured out if it actually caused him headaches, or if he just didn't want any sources on around him. He later moved to the middle of nowhere in West Virgina, and I remember reading a few months later about a community out there that surrounded themselves with a Faraday Cage.
Wonder if anyone ever told him about radio waves...or light in general.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree. If we had better privacy laws, this wouldn't be an issue.
Cops don't care about the privacy laws which already exist. (See: parallel construction.) If we had better privacy laws, they would just get sneakier.
Yup, and even so, it's up to the defendant to prove themselves innocent, which will take tens of thousands of dollars just to get to the point where a judge throws the case out.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#64At some point it's going to click that the issue isn't the technical confidentiality of data, it's the people who leverage it against you (and those who enable them) who are the real problem.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#65Is 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.
Do you want a self-hosted location tracker because you don't want someone else tracking you? Because it's not going to help. Your cell company knows where you are at all times, and even with location turned off, your OS is reporting enough information to either Google or Apple at all times to know where you are to within a few feet.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#66Is 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.
I use a trained neural network I keep between my ears... Recall is sometimes fuzzy with age, but it works well enough, and I don't have to worry about external queries violating my various rights nearly as much as with tech companies. At this point, I think every piece of modern consumer electronics ought to be considered hostile until proven benign. I've worked with enough of them over the years, on different ends,…
I recently set my google location history to auto-delete. At first I wanted to keep it recording my location history forever because "just in case" I needed to know where I was for something that was extremely unimportant. Overall, I've looked at it only handful of times over the many years it has been running so in the end it really helps Google more than it helps me. I might even just turn it off completely. I'm slowly shirking this data-hoarding, "I might need it one day", mentality.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#67Is 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.
Do you want a self-hosted location tracker because you don't want someone else tracking you? Because it's not going to help. Your cell company knows where you are at all times, and even with location turned off, your OS is reporting enough information to either Google or Apple at all times to know where you are to within a few feet.
That's not true: when location is turned off, location is turned off. Apple still has a loophole where turning off Bluetooth doesn't turn off Bluetooth, but location should be "fixed"
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you want a self-hosted location tracker because you don't want someone else tracking you? Because it's not going to help. Your cell company knows where you are at all times, and even with location turned off, your OS is reporting enough information to either Google or Apple at all times to know where you are to within a few feet.
That's not true: when location is turned off, location is turned off. Apple still has a loophole where turning off Bluetooth doesn't turn off Bluetooth, but location should be "fixed"
I thought the Bluetooth thing only applied from the quick menu. I've been told if you disable it in Settings that it will actually turn it off.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#69Someone (Eric Schmidt? not sure) once said, "If you really want something to be private, don't put it on a computer."
Still the best advice. Rather than storing it and then worrying about where it goes, just don't store it.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only foolproof method is to stick your phone in a Faraday cage both going to and leaving the location you want private, right? Or cage it and leave it at home?
I can't find it now, but I read an article about the Capitol riot that said the FBI was actively looking for individuals whose phones followed the pattern you describe. Traveling towards the Capitol on Jan 6, going dark, later coming back online is perhaps an indicator the person didn't want to be observed at the Capitol. Likewise, traveling to D.C., and leaving the phone at the hotel all day, then moving in the even…
I heard the same thing from Alan Dershowitz on Preet Bharara's podcast. I think you'd certainly need to keep your phone dark for long periods of time prior to the event and possibly have someone briefly unsheath it from the cage for plausible deniability. Even so, you're only ensuring that the prosecution can't use that piece of evidence against you - you're not exonerating yourself entirely by any stretch.