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Fast Company reports that Police in Raleigh, North Carolina, have presented Google with warrants to obtain data from mobile phones from not just specific suspects who were in a crime scene area, but from the mobile phones of all people in the area.
The above story links to an investigative piece at WRAL:
In at least four investigations last year – cases of murder, sexual battery and even possible arson at the massive downtown fire in March 2017 – Raleigh police used search warrants to demand Google accounts not of specific suspects, but from any mobile devices that veered too close to the scene of a crime, according to a WRAL News review of court records. These warrants often prevent the technology giant for months from disclosing information about the searches not just to potential suspects, but to any users swept up in the search.
City and county officials say the practice is a natural evolution of criminal investigative techniques. They point out that, by seeking search warrants, they're carefully balancing civil rights with public safety.
Defense attorneys and privacy advocates, both locally and nationally, aren't so sure.
They're mixed on how law enforcement turns to Google's massive cache of user data, especially without a clear target in mind. And they're concerned about the potential to snag innocent users, many of whom might not know just how closely the company tracks their every move.
"We are willingly sharing an awful lot of our lives with Google," said Jonathan Jones, a former Durham prosecutor who directs the North Carolina Open Government Coalition at Elon University. "But do people understand that in sharing that information with Google, they're also potentially sharing it with law enforcement?"
[...] Users can switch location tracking off to prevent the device from pinging GPS satellites. But if it's on a cellular network or connected to Wi-Fi, the device is still transmitting its coordinates to third parties, even if they're far less accurate than GPS.
In the past, at least, turning off that technology has been no guarantee of privacy.
Business and technology news site Quartz discovered late last year that Google continued to track devices even when all GPS, Wi-Fi and cell networks were supposedly disabled. The tech giant says it has updated its software to stop the practice.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Immerman on Tuesday March 20 2018, @04:12PM (2 children)
They did - the place to be searched is several city blocks, or Google's servers, depending on how you look at it. The things to be seized are all location data recorded for anyone who passed through that area.
It does seem extremely over-broad, but also seems to fall within the letter of the law. At least as one isolated incident. The problem is that I really doubt that data gets deleted, and given the frequency of crime reports in an urban environment you wouldn't need to get much broader to have it practically translate to "all location data recorded for everyone, all the time", at which point de-anonymizing the data is relatively trivial, and you've got your handy-dandy surveillance state population tracking infrastructure in place.
Even without going full surveillance state it would be really easy to abuse as though it were. You know where there's a meeting of an inconvenient group like the Black Panthers, KKK, voting-integrity activists, etc? No need to do actual police work to track everyone, just arrange a car-jacking or something in the neighborhood, and collect all the location information of everyone at the meeting - where they came from, where they went afterwards, etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 21 2018, @01:00AM (1 child)
There's an easy workaround - don't carry a smartphone anywhere you don't want to be tracked. Or put it in a faraday cage. Any group that considers government to be a threat to their organization should be following these procedures anyway, given Snowden and all that other fun stuff.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday March 21 2018, @04:48PM
I feel no contradiction in simultaneously advocating for both practical "workarounds", and reasonable limits on government. Especially since there's no practical way to simultaneously eliminate the collection of location data while still getting the many benefits of having that data available. Meaning that most people, most of the time, will have that tracking data collected about them, and the resulting "data holes" caused by those taking precautions will thus stand out in stark relief, inviting further attention.