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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

#231

Post by bombcar »

lr4444lr wrote: post #225
MereInterest wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite. The problem is asymmetry of information, and that the protections haven't advanced alongside the ease of collecting information. For example, imaging you have a suspect and want to trail them. The courts have established that you have no expectation of privacy when in a public area, so an officer can trail your car and watch where you go. You only have so many officers, and so there are implicit limits on…

I am pretty sure thr police cannot put a GPS tracker on your car without a warrant.

And now they don’t have to because you carry your own gps tracker with you and Google will sing easily.

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

#232

Post by spoonjim »

sodality2 wrote: post #177
endless1234 wrote: post #145

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 .

How can it be not ingested at all? If Google is giving me turn by turn directions it needs to know where I am.

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

#233

Post by judge2020 »

motohagiography wrote: post #64

At 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.

Well, yes, but if you go after the people in the news, all the random data brokerage companies in the shadows get off scot-free and continue doing their own data harvesting. You also can't punish people for leveraging data against you if there's no law for either holding such data or using it for societally-bad purposes.

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

#235

Post by Lamad123 »

sjwalter wrote: post #197
slownews45 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I dunno, I mostly agree with you, but I think lately, at least with my family and friends, the coronavirus political response has made many more people much more skeptical about centralized authority figures. The narrative that is commonly recounted is that it's obvious that the people in authority are either incredibly incompetent or crazily power-hungry, and both are leading many of my family and friends to questio…

Kafka's hallucinations make a lot of sense in today's world!!

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

#236

Post by lr4444lr »

0des wrote: post #229
lr4444lr wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am pretty sure thr police cannot put a GPS tracker on your car without a warrant.

You'd be wrong in the USA. Anybody who parks in any public space or outdoors can have a unit placed on their vehicle by anybody.

Legally?

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

#237

Post by mwint »

lavabiopsy wrote: post #213
sjwalter wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, I mostly agree with you, but I think lately, at least with my family and friends, the coronavirus political response has made many more people much more skeptical about centralized authority figures. The narrative that is commonly recounted is that it's obvious that the people in authority are either incredibly incompetent or crazily power-hungry, and both are leading many of my family and friends to questio…

I'm just curious: What exactly is seen as being new or remarkable about the failure of some leaders during this pandemic? I share the frustration about these failures, but are your friends/family too young to know about other spectacular failures like Watergate, or Iran-Contra, or the Iraq War, etc? (I could go on) Edit: I just realized my second question is somewhat US-centric so if you aren't from the US then I apo…

In my circles, this is often the first time legislation (often not even that - often executive action, sometimes by unelected folks!) has had such an immediate, clear impact on people’s lives.

Many of my friends and family have had their closest interaction with the government be taxes & vehicle registration at the DMV - inconveniences, but not much more.

What you list are indeed spectacular failures, but they happened “over there” or “to other people”.

Suddenly, the government is telling _them_ they can’t buy something, they they have to wear a mask, they have to inject something in their body, they can’t go to a concert. Many in my circle have never felt the hand of government so directly.

That’s what’s new and remarkable for a lot of people.

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

#238

Post by LMYahooTFY »

imglorp wrote: post #32
hundchenkatze wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 abo…

Don't carry a phone is obviously not option for people in many positions.

IMO it's a bit nihilistic compared to pushing for privacy guards for infrastructure.

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

#239

Post by MereInterest »

lr4444lr wrote: post #225
MereInterest wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll bite. The problem is asymmetry of information, and that the protections haven't advanced alongside the ease of collecting information. For example, imaging you have a suspect and want to trail them. The courts have established that you have no expectation of privacy when in a public area, so an officer can trail your car and watch where you go. You only have so many officers, and so there are implicit limits on…

I am pretty sure thr police cannot put a GPS tracker on your car without a warrant.

Whether or not there is a warrant is tangential to my argument. There used to be hard physical limits to the amount of surveillance that could be done. Now, the only limits are legal limits. Those legal limits were never designed to be the only limit, and are insufficient in their current form.

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

#240

Post by peterburkimsher »

chrononaut wrote: post #161
Syonyk wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't understand the point you're making (unless you're being snarky.) I am. I'm referring to my brain in a "tech industry buzzword" way. It is, technically speaking, a trained neural network. Just a biological one, not a silicon/code based one. I happen to like it, and it can also do things like tell the difference between a low moon in the sky through a smoke haze and a traffic light. > Another way of framing i…

Right, and I think OP (or at least myself) agrees with the points you've made, which is why they seem to be trying strike a balance between gaining the advantages of Location History, but keeping that data to themselves and outside the Google umbrella, and thus want to understand how to do it. I view it similarly as others looking at methods to self-host their photo backup with timeline indexing and searching, etc.

Ten years ago, in 2011, Pete Warden discovered that the iPhone was tracking peoples' locations. It was considered to be a bug at the time, because it was only intended to be stored for up to a week, for knowing which phone transmitter to use.

https://petewarden.github.io/iPhoneTracker/

"the advantages of Location History"

I thought that this data would be useful to help geotag the photos in my iPhoto library. So I wrote a little script to parse the iPhone data, and cross-match the timestamps with photos. Never became really popular though, probably because people now use phones to take photos and they already include the location in the EXIF data.

iPhone Geotag

https://peterburk.github.io/programs/#iPhoneGeotag

"keeping that data to themselves"

Once the bug was fixed, and Apple stopped storing location data indefinitely, I thought it would be kind of handy as a feature. So I wrote a little PHP script that ran on my jailbroken iPhone and saved a log of my location every 30 minutes.

It recorded data from Monday, May 12, 2014 3:44:52 PM to Wednesday, April 8, 2015 9:00:06 AM

My battery life got worse, because the GPS kept turning on. During that whole year, I never wanted to check the data, not even once. So I turned off the script. Not tracking myself made me less self-conscious about where I was walking and what I was doing, and it was a relief.

I do use an iPhone, but it's an old 4S with iOS 6.1.3, and I only switch on 3G rarely in case of emergencies. I don't use iCloud for backup, only USB sync. The phone companies will know my location, but Apple probably don't. With the security features all compromised through jailbreaking, I can see everything on my phone so I know what data they could possibly get. And that's good enough for me.

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