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posted by chromas on Monday April 15 2019, @02:02PM   Printer-friendly
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.


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  • (Score: 2) by aiwarrior on Monday April 15 2019, @04:02PM (2 children)

    by aiwarrior (1812) on Monday April 15 2019, @04:02PM (#829894) Journal

    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.

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  • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Monday April 15 2019, @04:05PM (1 child)

    by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Monday April 15 2019, @04:05PM (#829900) Journal

    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

      by aiwarrior (1812) on Monday April 15 2019, @04:45PM (#829925) Journal

      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.