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

theguardian.com

201–210 of 327 posts

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

#201

Phones are a liability.

>> Phones are a liability

them: I'd like you to carry this tracking device with you everywhere you go. It tracks your location down to a few meters. It tracks who you talk to and records your conversations. It tracks what you spend your money on. It sends us all this information, we save it, and provide it to the government when they ask. How about that?

us: That's Orwellian. It's a complete violation of privacy and likely illegal. I would never consent to that.

them: You can take selfies with it and play Cow Clicker on it.

us: I'll give you $500 for it.

them: There's a more expensive version where when people message you you can see if they are using the cheap version or the expensive version.

us: I'll give you $1000 for the expensive version.

them: The "pro" version takes better selfies.

us: I'll give you $1500 for the "pro" version.

them: You can only store 75,000 selfies on the "pro" version but you can upgrade to storage for 300,000 selfies.

us: I'll give you $2000 for the upgraded version.

them, 6 months later: There's a new tracking device out, it's the same as the one you have but it comes in Sierra Blue.

us: I'll give you another $2000.

them: But wait! There's more!

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

#202
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.

https://gpslogger.app/ open source has plenty of settings can make a GET call every x minutes to url of your choice, you can either collect data by logging GET calls on your nginx or build an API for that specifically.

Or you save to Gpx files and see history with any Gpx File Viewer

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

#203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If so, why believe "don't save location history" would mean anything either?

Difference being "don't save" would mean not being ingested at all; if it is sent to google, a stink could be made (perhaps by sniffing netreqs, looking at GPS requests, etc). Once it's in Google, us peons would have no way to verify any claim .

No. "don't save" does not mean "don't send to google".

All geolocation based on GSM cells and wifi sends your location continuously.

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

#204
post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd hope not. We should normalize less surveillance, not more.

How is it surveillance when two consenting adults share their location with each other using a self hosted service?

Consent is not a simple binary thing.

Creating expectations around accepting surveillance is not healthy.

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

#205
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I've used this in the past but currently it's showing no records for all my 3 passports.

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

#206
post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love Google Location History. If you're trying to make a point to someone about how much of a problem data collection, use, abuse, etc, is - link them to the place they can view their own history. It's even more fun if you're with them and can watch the expression of utter horror form as they realize just what, exactly, literally everywhere they've been can tell someone else about them. "Hey, isn't that the kink cl…

I check this from time to time and mine has always been completely blank. Even on my phone when I search for "tires in " it assumes I mean a city in the east coast of the US. Maps/Waze are only marginally better, showing me results 170+ miles from my current location, generally. I use trackmenot and ad nauseam plugins on my main computer, so my ads are always 100% irrelevant - if I see them at all. Ad nauseam clicks…

That $17k would've either been rejected as ad fraud in the best case, and just ended up funding the companies you hate at worst.

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

#207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abl…

These newfangled beamforming systems can alter the direction of transmission to optimize signal quality for your phone. How can they do that if the system cannot locate a handset with great accuracy?

Beams don't have to be that accurate to boost signal quality.

This is also speculation on my part but I'd suspect they're targeting specific clusters of devices in an area and using multiplexing than having dozens of radios on one tower.

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

#208

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'm not minimizing the dangers of someone else recording you. I don't think Schmidt was even thinking about that, probably because smartphones weren't so ubiquitous then. However, you CAN control what you do yourself. Your to-do list can quite easily be on a paper notebook, as can your journal. Another thread here talks about self-hosting your location history -- why TF would you even want that? You can leave your ph…

I'm more talking about your own devices recording and spying on you, without your consent.

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

#209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you pay cash and get it from out of town I don't see how they'd track you, unless the lumber store is doing facial recognition and uploading that data somewhere. Maybe we need straw buyers for lumber?

You think LEO only asks Google for location data, and not, for example, On-Star or auto OEMs?

Serious question: are there links about the data your car keeps on you (if any)? I'm not talking about if you use Google or other web location services.

I've done some cursory asking around and found nothing. I would think the real problem is that every car manufacturer and every model year is different.

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

#210

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 count…

What fundamental problem do you have with cops using tech to catch criminals?

Not talking about the abuse of innocents here, or warrantless intrusions into your data, just the core of what you're saying.

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