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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

#181

Post by vkou »

daenz wrote: post #170
mercora wrote: post #168

does it work both ways? can i present this data as an alibi when i need one? if its not deemed accurate for that why would it be considered for evidence? and if it is that seems like free alibis for everyone guilty or not ;)

Which do you think is more important? Needing to present an alibi in the case of you being wrongly accused? Or needing to conceal your actions in a world where something new has been made illegal?

Which do you think is more important? An innocent person being able to prove their innocence, or a criminal being able to conceal their crimes?

The entire millenium-old body of law surrounding what rights you have when dealing with the police exists in order to protect the innocent, not the guilty.

Things like warrants don't exist to make it impossible for the police to do their work. They exist to make it so that they spend less[1] time harassing people who have done nothing wrong. It's difficult to frame the police scooping up data that a third party has on you as harassment.

[1] But not no.

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

#182

Post by evilos »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #179
NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about raising money to buy a bunch of data from, say, the Washington, D.C. area and then de-anonymizing it. I wonder what we'd learn...

I wonder how a different tactic would fare: 1. Buy some legit(ish) dataset for marketing purposes. I hear DMVs in the US like to sell people's data. 2. Do a direct marketing job: send every single person in the dataset a snail mail letter with a printout of all the data you have on them, and a reference to where you got it from. I hear USPS offers good rates for bulk spam campaigns; they apparently live off it. That…

This would cause so much chaos and probably result in thousands of divorces. Maybe we could get a lawyers group to front the money lol.

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

#183

Post by pixl97 »

mercora wrote: post #172
daenz wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which do you think is more important? Needing to present an alibi in the case of you being wrongly accused? Or needing to conceal your actions in a world where something new has been made illegal?

i just tried to point out this data should be useless for prosecution. this could easily be faked to make up an alibi when you are correctly accused of something.

In the US you are innocent until accused. Police organizations and the FBI love to come in and question the people around you with very pointed questionnaires that can make it seem like you are a very bad person.

The number of guilty people that get off by it would be irrelevant compared to the number of innocents that become stigmatized by their peers.

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

#184

Post by Scoundreller »

dudus wrote: post #160
dawnerd wrote: 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.

I just had to provide records of my past travel history for immigration purposes and I couldn't find any of my i-94 records. I could sort through emails to find past flight tickets but the data from my Google location tracking history proved to be much more reliable and easy to parse. I was able to get all my flight dates from past 5 years easily with it. I also like to look for places I've been in the past and Googl…

You couldn’t use CBP’s travel history page?

https://i94.cbp.dhs.gov/I94/#/history-search

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

#185

Post by dillondoyle »

NoImmatureAdHom wrote: post #156
midnightGhost wrote: post #95

I remember that story about Zachary McCoy. This whole thing continues to get worse quick and will continue to get worse. I know people say we need legislation and regulation on data privacy and tech companies which we do. But before that gets taken seriously (at least in the US) it's going to take something real scandalous done by tech companies and actually affect the common folk where they actually start to care. R…

What about raising money to buy a bunch of data from, say, the Washington, D.C. area and then de-anonymizing it. I wonder what we'd learn...

Has happened with grindr a few times that I know of. https://accesswdun.com/article/2021/7/1024075

And the Strava on military bases thing. https://www.wired.com/story/strava-heat-map-military-bases-f...

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

#186

Post by ghastmaster »

the-dude wrote: post #19
ghastmaster wrote: post #16

Geofence warrants are analogous to getting a warrant for the check-in log at a hotel after a guest is murdered. So long as there is probable cause, this should not be a legal issue. See https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/probable_cause : > A judge may issue a search warrant if the affidavit in support of the warrant offers sufficient credible information to establish probable cause. When you use these types of technolog…

Not in my hometown in The Netherlands. We had a high profile murder by stabbing, a suspect and the police was denied the information you are talking about ( I think ). The case was high profile because the victim was in his early twenties and seemed to be stabbed 'at random' during his jogging.

Do you know why the information was not provided? What legal basis?

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

#187

Post by slownews45 »

midnightGhost wrote: post #95

I remember that story about Zachary McCoy. This whole thing continues to get worse quick and will continue to get worse. I know people say we need legislation and regulation on data privacy and tech companies which we do. But before that gets taken seriously (at least in the US) it's going to take something real scandalous done by tech companies and actually affect the common folk where they actually start to care. R…

HN is pretty out of touch I think.

When I talk to non HN crowd.

* Apple's efforts around blocking CASM are applauded

* Folks are GLAD that cops are using tech to catch criminals

* Folks don't have a ton of trust that the regulations will help their lives, or block govt from doing things, but do imagine they will be annoying (more permission banners / cookies popups etc).

It would be interesting to look at other countries where the govt has gotten more hands on with regulations in this area (data retention etc). I know in some spaces I've seen the regulations actually end up REQUIRING retention of records, or the liability risks require retention of video for a long time (ie, railroads have REALLY dialed up use of video given the claims they were facing in terms of running into people - once they started tracking a retaining a lot more - claims went way down - not saying folks were lying before but they are going to push back on getting rid of their data collection at this point unless laws change).

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

#188

Post by TeMPOraL »

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.

> I predict an increase in the number of golfers

You mean people who think they're safe because they don't realize they're in the earshot of another player's/random jogger's smartphone?

(I'm totally thinking of a scene from Person of Interest, 4x12, when a character hides in a park and makes a call over satellite phone, to talk out of earshot of a malicious AI surveilling everyone, only to be spotted by it through a smartphone of a passing cyclist. Can't find any video clip of to link here, though.)

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

#189

Post by [deleted] »

jjoonathan wrote: post #81
flanbiscuit wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Do we have reason to believe that auto-delete means anything other than "hide it from me, please?"

[deleted]

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

#190

Post by daenz »

vkou wrote: post #181
daenz wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which do you think is more important? Needing to present an alibi in the case of you being wrongly accused? Or needing to conceal your actions in a world where something new has been made illegal?

Which do you think is more important? An innocent person being able to prove their innocence, or a criminal being able to conceal their crimes? The entire millenium-old body of law surrounding what rights you have when dealing with the police exists in order to protect the innocent, not the guilty. Things like warrants don't exist to make it impossible for the police to do their work. They exist to make it so that th…

>or a criminal being able to conceal their crimes?

What if I made something that you like to do illegal? Now you are a criminal concealing their crimes. Now your tech works against you and you must comply.

I absolutely agree with erring on the side of letting criminals get away with more if it means preserving privacy. No alibi safety net is worth trading away your privacy.

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