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

theguardian.com

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

#111

Post by PeterisP »

jjoonathan wrote: post #82
refulgentis wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"

Your cell phone company knows the tower you are talking to and probably which (directional) antenna you are talking to. Antennas are in the process of getting a lot more directional with 5G, so they'll soon go from trivially being able to track you within a block or two to within a meter or two. It's not great.

The core records of a cell phone company are at a cell level, which often are configured in a 120-degree sectors from a tower.

If they really want, they can see the distance from the tower because that's a requirement for the communications protocol to work (LTE at least expects to account for lightspeed delay in allocating transmission slots) and gets measured during the communications, so the operator should be able to see that distance to the granularity of something like 100m (or is it less nowadays?); but AFAIK that's usually not stored unless you're in a 911 call or perhaps with some tracing warrant.

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

#112

Post by BoxOfRain »

asquabventured wrote: post #104
dimitrios1 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Don't put it on a computer, don't say it within earshot of a computer, and don't have it visible to any computer's camera: getting pretty impossible to follow this advice.

> Don't put it on a computer, don't say it within earshot of a computer, and don't have it visible to any computer's camera: getting pretty impossible to follow this advice. I predict an increase in the number of golfers and boat enthusiasts in my lifetime.

>boat enthusiasts

Boat enthusiast here, I'm afraid even that'll be a struggle! I'm planning to move onto a sailing yacht fairly soon and carry on my job as a backend web developer, mobile internet is good enough to make this viable and things like Starlink will make it even easier in the coming years.

I suppose you can still turn off the telescreen if you want to though, if you sail out of range of mobile towers and turn everything off you can hide from the world pretty effectively.

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

#114

Post by UweSchmidt »

jimbob45 wrote: post #14
sneak wrote: post #2

Reminder: Turn off location services/GPS systemwide to opt out of these databases. The subscriber location tracking performed by cell towers is much lower resolution.

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?

Things are probably not quite there yet, but...

How about a real-time analysis of all security camera footage and everyone's photos and videos, using face recognition and other techniques (movement, clothes associated with a person etc.). Cars are tracked via license plate, if they are not online now anyway. You pay cash but "they" know the serial number of the bill the ATM gave to you and which shop owner gave it back to the bank a little later.

There are probably many patterns that are only known to people who do this kind of thing full time. Maybe there is a very small number of people who buy the very same two items at a gas station. If Amazon knows who's pregnant early, some will know who's trying to go private and why before they know it...

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

#115

Post by Clubber »

uhtred wrote: post #109

Just don't use Google?! Seriously, it's not that hard to remove google from your personal life. If your job makes you use google, just view your email using the web app or use an email client on phone.

Sure, but Google is just one way to collect that data. You'd have to get rid of your cell phone, or at least not carry it around. Better make sure your car doesn't have OnStar or any other similar tracking device built in too. Once facial recognition goes mainstream, you're pretty hosed regardless of what you do.

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

#116

Post by dimitrios1 »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #112
asquabventured wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't put it on a computer, don't say it within earshot of a computer, and don't have it visible to any computer's camera: getting pretty impossible to follow this advice. I predict an increase in the number of golfers and boat enthusiasts in my lifetime.

>boat enthusiasts Boat enthusiast here, I'm afraid even that'll be a struggle! I'm planning to move onto a sailing yacht fairly soon and carry on my job as a backend web developer, mobile internet is good enough to make this viable and things like Starlink will make it even easier in the coming years. I suppose you can still turn off the telescreen if you want to though, if you sail out of range of mobile towers and…

I hate to break it to you all, but there are computers in the sky now, too.

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

#117

Post by asquabventured »

BoxOfRain wrote: post #112
asquabventured wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Don't put it on a computer, don't say it within earshot of a computer, and don't have it visible to any computer's camera: getting pretty impossible to follow this advice. I predict an increase in the number of golfers and boat enthusiasts in my lifetime.

>boat enthusiasts Boat enthusiast here, I'm afraid even that'll be a struggle! I'm planning to move onto a sailing yacht fairly soon and carry on my job as a backend web developer, mobile internet is good enough to make this viable and things like Starlink will make it even easier in the coming years. I suppose you can still turn off the telescreen if you want to though, if you sail out of range of mobile towers and…

Cheers! And when you come to port for a round of 18 it's perfectly normal to just leave your phone in the car or on the cart. Easy to have a great one on one conversation away from everything while standing around on the putting green.

Makes sense why so many business and political deals are made on the golf course when you start thinking about the meta aspects of having no paper trail or being vulnerable to eavesdropping secretarial eyes & ears or some all-listening tech-panoptican.

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

#118

Post by sneak »

KingMachiavelli wrote: post #107
sneak wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checking traffic before you depart also leaks your location, as well as your intended path of travel.

It can not be used to prove that you actually did travel though. You can also put in only approximate address locations. Google isn't going to be running some inference algorithm to identify your most probable location or residence, they are just going to give LE the raw data. Unless you are a extremely wanted criminal, LE probably doesn't have the resources to do extensive analysis of google maps searches and a jury…

If you get to the point where a jury is evaluating anything you have already lost.

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

#119

Post by Forbo »

twofornone wrote: post #23

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…

> 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.

This is typically my go to for any discussion regarding privacy apathy. Citing things like the NSA's "Total Information Awareness" and "Nobody But Us" attitudes also does well to tie into this.

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

#120

Post by MomoXenosaga »

flanbiscuit wrote: post #66
Syonyk wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sl…

At the risk of sounding paranoid but how do we know if they actually pause/delete it?
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