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from the it's-okay;-he-was-released-after-a-week dept.
Submitted via IRC for SoyCow1984
Law enforcement taps Google's Sensorvault for location data, report says
Police have used information from the search giant's Sensorvault database to aid in criminal cases across the country, according to a report Saturday by The New York Times. The database has detailed location records from hundreds of millions of phones around the world, the report said. It's meant to collect information on the users of Google's products so the company can better target them with ads, and see how effective those ads are.
But police have been tapping into the database to help find missing pieces in investigations. Law enforcement can get "geofence" warrants seeking location data. Those kinds of requests have spiked in the last six months, and the company has received as many as 180 requests in one week, according to the report.
[...] For geofence warrants, police carve out a specific area and time period, and Google can gather information from Sensorvault about the devices that were present during that window, according to the report. The information is anonymous, but police can analyze it and narrow it down to a few devices they think might be relevant to the investigation. Then Google reveals those users' names and other data, according to the Times.
[...] It's not uncommon for law enforcement to seek help from tech companies during investigations. But the use of Sensorvault data has raised concerns about innocent people being implicated. For example, the Times interviewed a man who was arrested last year in a murder investigation after Google's data had reportedly landed him on the police's radar. But he was released from jail after a week, when investigators pinpointed and arrested another suspect.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by aiwarrior on Monday April 15 2019, @03:32PM (6 children)
The thing is that in the article it is written that there are now warrants that are fishing expeditions: like a warrant to find everybody in the area, then a warrant for specific person's data and further on an actual physical warrant.
Not only is this chain worrying by itself because it is extremely circumnstancial there was actually a dude that was in jail for some time, losing his job and defaulting because of such flimsy evidence. It turned out the boyfriend of his mother drove his car and his phone was there. BAM, Visual evidence and secondary evidence of being on the scene. Scary shit.
I only see one silver lining, in America the Rule of law and civil society scrutinize all the branches. Judges are not saints and it seems some of them are going to be looking bad. In my country I am not sure shit like this does not just stay between "those in the know", leaving all the people screwed. In Portugal there was the political police and I always think how they would pee themselves for the opportunity to have everybody wearing a tracking device showing associations of individuals. All the clandestine groups would either be singled out by association or for being outliers in not wearing the tracking device at all times. Either way, non-conformance is caught. Things are getting so bad and scary that my mother, which by no means gives a damn about hacktivism nor is she a technical person, starts to feel a kind of claustrophobia similar to 1984.
The unknown silver lining is whether this starts being the drop in the bucket for people to start choosing Apple instead of Android. It has been too much lately: The Nokia-China phone home; the Italian Malware that completely owned Android root but was harmless in iPhone; and now this: Google mass handing over data of people in an area.
My take away from this is that there needs to be a strong anonymization drive in Google. Protect themselves by some kind of onion routing the private data, so they can still deliver their adds and earn their bread while not falling into hot water like this. I just bought a new phone with Android because I could not stand paying 1k$ for a phone but given the latest i start to regret it. Sucks to be frugal/poor.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday April 15 2019, @03:37PM (5 children)
I'm not gonna say you're wrong per se, but I will say I'd love to be a prosecutor if you were a defense lawyer trying that argument in court.
"Fishing expedition" usually refers to an investigation that isn't attached to any known crime, not one unattached to any suspect. I definitely gotta feel you're stretching that definition a thousand times past the breaking point.
(Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Monday April 15 2019, @04:02PM (2 children)
I guess you are right in legal terms. I am not a lawyer, so I meant the colloquial "phishing expedition" in the sense of: go to fish shoal, throwing the net in an area and see what comes out.
*chuckling* I think the analogy came quite right.
As a side note I am so bad at legalese (even in my native Portuguese) that I once received a letter from the tax office and I could not understand what they were asking. After consulting with the accountant he "translated" some of the terms and it became quite obvious, similar to how your explanation is clear. Regardless, the only part I understood of the letter, was the part of where to pay. They went so far as "Select menu A > B > C and click pay". It turned out I did not even need to pay anything. It was just that they were asking me to hold on a payment I needed to do to somebody who owed tax money, and instead of paying my debt to my supplier I should just pay that amount to the tax man. I had already paid the debt so the request was void. Talk about mafia.
(Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday April 15 2019, @04:05PM (1 child)
But they're not. They're going to the (digital) scene of a crime, and identifying suspects. That's normal.
I promise this isn't a reflexive defense of cops, who usually suck balls, especially in the us. Just that the right to due process doesn't include never being investigated when circumstances warrant.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aiwarrior on Monday April 15 2019, @04:45PM
Yep I do understand and I understand that the State does not pretend it does not want to catch you. It can and it should exercise it's monopoly of violence/coercion, but the way it does is in my opinion important.
In the digital crime scene the data gathering power is disproportionate to the inquiry power available in the real-world crime scene. There is a sense of loss of control and lack of transparency that I understand makes people/me? uneasy. Example: a policeman making questions is visible and people know that something is going on. In the digital crime scene, it is google who is questioned and people may out of nowhere find themselves becoming prime suspects (and arrested as was the case of the article) without having any idea that there were even inquiries. Of course there are protections and procedures that the state gives you when you are arrested or need to make a statement but the social tissue gets into turmoil and mistrust ensues.
Most people consider themselves law abiding citizens but given that no one knows all the laws on the book, it is likely everybody has done a misdeed once in his life. The arbitrarity by which you may be caught is scary, as is the fact that something you did a long time ago is forever recorded. In a sense the State almost becomes God.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 15 2019, @06:06PM
That's kind of missing the point. Yes, this is more or less the opposite of a fishing expedition, but that kind of ignores the point. There's no particular reason for the police to believe any of the individuals that are represented by the data is guilty. And they're not having to provide any evidence that the data belongs to somebody that committed the crime. It's entirely possible that the individual committing the crime either didn't have a phone or had it turned off during the time period around when the crime was committed.
(Score: 2) by DeVilla on Thursday April 18 2019, @01:58AM
This is why no one likes lawyers. You are correct on a technicality (he used the wrong word, not being a lawyer himself) while ignoring that he was clearly referring to a dragnet (which is generally considered unconstitutional since it usually involves unreasonable searches).