Good! We need more of this. So tired of the crooks getting away with it. All the BLM assholes who got free shit last year should be in jail. They stole and made inflation go way up. Somebody's gotta pay, and it's the honest people.
The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
41–50 of 327 posts
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#42Is 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.
There have been a variety of such apps, going at least as far back as "Backitude" (now gone) on Android that could log to a local KML file that could then be uploaded to storage of your choice on a schedule.
It could also connect to a URL of your specification to upload real-time updates.
Keep in mind that if you're not concerned about immediate tracking you can log locally then use any of many options (e.g. FolderSync) to do scheduled uploads of a log file.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#43it will end up as a cat and mouse game surely poeple who are up to no good, would just turn off their phone - possibly taking the battery out or placing it in a foiled bag. or give it to another person or even hide it somewhere else doesn't seem very hard to circumvent
The vast, vast majority of criminals are too dumb to do any of that.
People have gotten away with heinous crimes for decades, only to ever be caught by chance. There are a staggering amount of unsolved murders and missing persons who have never been found. Even white collar crimes with clear paper trails can go on for decades.
As long as you're not committing a high profile crime, and you make a informed effort to minimize and/or erase as much evidence as possible, you're pretty likely to get away with a crime.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclaimer: I'm a Googler, but thankfully not dealing with any of this. Well, it won't stop the police. But the accuracy is lower, increasing the number of people that match the geofence. That changes the cost-benefit of asking for such a warrant.
It might be just my eastern european paranoia, but this just makes it easier for the authorities to put you into a place they want you to be, not harder.
Which is better depends on if your threat model is them targeting you specifically and then looking for pretexts or them deciding they want to target you specifically when looking through the contents of the dragnet.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#45Its 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…
That's what you have in Russia, operators are obliged to collect and store vast amounts of data under the SORM laws, and then bellingcat were able to access all this data in their investigations, that's how they got the location trail of the agents that shaddowed and poisened Navalny (and others). Bellingcat got all that data from a black market on data, where low profile employees are selling access to all this gathered data for a couple of dimes, see [3]. I wonder if a similar black data market is already in place in other countries...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Poisoning_of_Alexei...
[3] https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-fsb-...
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#46Is 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, to no longer trust any of them.
I'm also old enough to remember the before-times - when there wasn't the technology to track us everywhere, or, when we did have something breadcrumbing, it wasn't being automatically uploaded to whoever, wherever, etc.
My first question, though, would be "Why?" What value do you get out of tracking your location with any great detail that self hosting it would be of much value? However, various cheap GPS loggers and Google Earth import probably would do a lot of what you're looking for.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#47Reminder: 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?
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 evening was an indicator the person may have been at the Capitol.
I bring this up to say, Faraday cage and leaving the phone behind may not even be enough with a sufficiently large surveillance state.
Edit: leaving the phone at home is different than a hotel, of course. But even that might raise too much suspicion unless you frequently, and randomly, leave it at home. That way the lack of movement wouldn't necessarily indicate you didn't want to be tracked at a particular moment.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#48I've always had the habit of keeping Location services turned off while not in use, to conserve my phone's battery. Guess it's a privacy requisite now. I also remember having a habit of keeping mobile data off during the 3G days. Guess it's not feasible anymore.
> I also remember having a habit of keeping mobile data off during the 3G days. Guess it's not feasible anymore.
The biggest problem I've found lately with cell data off is that group texting breaks in weird ways. Most group texting is apparently MMS based, which is "Here's a text telling the phone to go download something from somewhere." If you've got data off, those end up queued weirdly, and can make group messages appear radically out of order when you get a data connection again.
Group texting is hard when you get into the weeds of it.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#49Is 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.
OsmAnd allows you to record your movement and leverages OpenStreetMap.
Re: The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am skeptical of using only technical solutions to non-technical problems. It rarely scales, IMO. Disclaimer: Work at Google, but opinions are my own.
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.