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An interesting follow-up on the SN story "CEO of Computer Management Services Inc. Murdered During Home Invasion":
After the fleeing suspects crashed and ran into the woods, police set up a perimeter with road checkpoints.
Soon, a Lyft driver approached a checkpoint and told police she was picking up a passenger nearby.
"This may be one of our suspects trying to leave the scene," Fayette County Sheriff Barry Babb thought of the person being picked up. So Babb and three officers got into his car, which happened to be identical to the Lyft driver's. They got the location of the suspect from the Lyft driver and simply drove to the suspect, posing as his ride.
"The subject walked all the way up, was about to open the door and get in our vehicle, when we exited and identified ourself" said Sheriff Babb. The suspect fled and got about 100 yards into the woods before being taken into custody. "That was something that was unique for us," Babb said, "a first time for us."
Link: http://www.myajc.com/news/police-use-lyft-trojan-horse-find-murder-suspect/vyciTzxxuGxsOhsWgDzcEI/
Note: Link is paywalled, but allows four articles to be read before paying.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by MrGuy on Thursday June 29 2017, @01:35PM (5 children)
Headline (which is from TFA) makes it sound like Lyft is sending data to law enforcement, or that law enforcement can "take over" Lyft rides using some kind of technological means.
That's...not at all what happened.
The suspects in a crime fled into a hard-to-search area. Police set up a perimeter around the area. The suspects called a
The cops saw a car approaching their perimeter, stopped the driver, and asked his business. He said he was s Lyft driver who got a call for a pickup. The cops put two and two together that it was probably the suspects, and asked the Lyft driver if they could impersonate him to catch the suspects.
The cops didn't know that the suspects called a Lyft by any technical means. They didn't even know for sure if the Lyft was called by the suspects or not.
A private citizen Lyft driver elected to help the cops out when asked in a specific case. Through non-technical means. I know we all like scaremongering headlines about your privacy being for sale or the gummint man coloring tech companies, but this story doesn't support that narrative.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday June 29 2017, @02:35PM (2 children)
Yeah. There's not actually much of a tech angle here. It could just as easily been a regular taxi.
(Score: 3, Informative) by inertnet on Thursday June 29 2017, @02:42PM (1 child)
Also it wasn't a horse, just a car.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @02:48PM
Nor was it Trojan.
(Score: 1) by All Your Lawn Are Belong To Us on Thursday June 29 2017, @05:12PM (1 child)
True. It only makes it more likely (if the story becomes widely known) to make a suspect who's murdered someone that much more likely to murder the Lyft or Uber driver who comes to pick them up. (Since they could be a cop now, why take the chance? Why not just kill them and take the car? They're already guilty of murder anyway...)
This sig for rent.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @05:39PM
Yeah, but they'd just been a
plebecivilian murdering another civilian.Being a Cop Killer™... that means they've killed somebody important, so retribution will be increased against them tenfold.