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from the Always-clear-your-history-when-planning-crimes dept.
A woman's search history has been used by authorities to convict her of murder after her husband died. Natasha Darcy was found guilty of murdering partner Mathew Dunbar with her plans to inherit his $3.5 million farm exposed as she attempted to lie to police about her actions and intent. Key evidence was found in her search history which matched up to physical evidence found.
Natasha Darcy guilty of murdering partner Mathew Dunbar
Natasha Darcy has been found guilty of murdering her partner Mathew Dunbar by drugging him with a sedative cocktail blended in a Nutribullet and gassing him in his bed in a bid to inherit his $3.5 million farm.
In the months before Mr Dunbar was found dead, dozens of incriminating searches were recorded on Darcy's iPhone, among them: "How to commit murder."
A jury of 11 declared the 46-year-old mother guilty on Tuesday after deliberating since last Wednesday.
Mr Dunbar, 42, was a sheep farmer who lived and worked on his property Pandora on the outskirts of Walcha in northern NSW.
Darcy claimed she found her partner of three years in the early hours of August 2, 2017, with a plastic bag over his head that was hooked up to a helium cylinder. She rang triple-0 and he was declared dead at the scene.
The ram sedative acepromazine and medications temazepam, clonidine and seroquel were found in both Mr Dunbar's blood and a dirty blender cup and glass left in the dishwasher.
Darcy pointed to Mr Dunbar's finances, history of depression and suicidal ideation, "unclear sexual orientation" and a severe calf infection he suffered weeks before his death as reasons he might have killed himself.
But her search history told a different story, the jury heard during the 10-week trial in the NSW Supreme Court.
Same things goes for porn and your marriage.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @01:43PM (18 children)
Do people not clear their browser history? Ever?
Or is this "history" not something a user can clear on their own?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by DannyB on Tuesday June 15 2021, @01:48PM (6 children)
I suspect that Google has your search history even if your browser does not.
I would point out something about social media: many of the 'participants' (to try to use a neutral non-charged word), on January 6, 2021, deleted all of their social media, some even deleted their entire accounts. Deleted all their photos. Yet the FBI was able to produce all of it as evidence.
I say that merely to observe that it may be more difficult to delete online activity than anyone may think.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday June 15 2021, @02:18PM (1 child)
The Wayback Machine https://archive.org/web/ [archive.org] is a public example of an archiver - you can be sure that LEAs the world over run scrapers on all available social media that produce similar archives, particularly on persons of interest, but I'd bet any agency with the budget just trawls and archives it all.
Україна досі не є частиною Росії Слава Україні🌻 https://news.stanford.edu/2023/02/17/will-russia-ukraine-war-end
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @02:53PM
Better yet, mandate that companies archive their stuff and have to produce it on demand by law enforcement. Hand off the work, maintain the power. Only problem is when the illusion of power fades there's nothing there!
(Score: 2) by turgid on Tuesday June 15 2021, @04:23PM (3 children)
GCHQ certainly has your search history. They apparently buy a lot of hard disks so it goes.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Tuesday June 15 2021, @05:46PM (2 children)
Maybe yours. Mine not. Apart from the fact that only a minority of searches actually were through Google, even for those few they probably can't assign all of them to one person. They probably can figure out that all those searches I did from work in the past decades were from the same person, though, due to a publicly visible unique IP address for that computer.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday June 15 2021, @06:00PM (1 child)
There is this thing: browser fingerprinting. [pixelprivacy.com] (not to be confused with browser finger painting.) In that link see: Canvas fingerprinting.
Browsers send in an astonishing amount of information. [avast.com] OS and version. Browser and version. JavaScript support or not. Screen size. Various tracking cookies maybe. And more.
As long as they can see what the server sees from your requests, it doesn't matter if a lot of different people are coming from the same IP address.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday June 16 2021, @04:05AM
Yes, I know browser fingerprinting. The vast majority of it requires JavaScript. And yes, having JavaScript disabled itself can be used as part of a fingerprint, but that is not very specific.
And for a long time, I had ben using standard Firefox, not exactly a fringe browser. And of course, once I switched browsers, as far as Google is concerned, I was a different person anyway (note that I don't have a Google account, so there's no way to identify me that way). Now currently I'm using a pretty non-standard browser (Waterfox), thus Google probably has a much easier time identifying me. But then, I very rarely use Google to search, so they still don't get much of a search history.
And my screen resolution is probably the most common one, 1920x1080.
Cookies? Well, that's another thing you can disable.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday June 15 2021, @02:04PM
In the days of Internet Explorer, extensive logging happened behind the scenes, that no "typical" or "non-techie" user was going to delete. You had to do an internet search, at the minimum, to even learn where to look for that data. Other browsers were much simpler, with options to empty cache, delete history, delete search history etc only buried a couple layers into the settings options.
A lot of people never do clear their histories though. They simply have no clue what those histories tell a suspicious person.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @02:18PM (3 children)
And now thanks to Soylent I have these terms in my browser history. Thanks a LOT guys.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @02:55PM (2 children)
Just avoid murdering people for a few months and you should be good to go again.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @04:57PM (1 child)
I can't promise that.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @08:42PM
Just claim your target is a nazi who brought it upon themselves by saying the "N word" and that any juror who votes "guilty" is a racist.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @04:17PM (4 children)
do you speak it??
(Score: 3, Informative) by DannyB on Tuesday June 15 2021, @06:05PM (3 children)
A few messages above I mention browser fingerprinting. Incognito mode doesn't help that much.
In one of the links I provide (above), see Canvas fingerprinting. I can create a small canvas, draw some text in a specified font, size, etc. Capture all of the canvas pixels, hash them, then send that in to the server. Just that alone is a lot of information unique to your browser. Including your background color, particular fonts installed, details about how our browser and operating system render that text, etc. Completely independent of incognito modem.
And its more worser than you think.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2) by mrpg on Tuesday June 15 2021, @06:52PM (2 children)
Right, incognito mode stops the browser from remembering things, but the servers still log all they want.
------------------
Brave Browser:
Private browsing stops Brave from saving browsing activity beyond the current session; however, you activity may still be visible to:
Certain websites you visit (this includes the ads and resources used on those sites)
The owner/Administrator of your network
Your internet service provider
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Tuesday June 15 2021, @08:34PM (1 child)
The "fingerprint" of your browser is enough for the server to realize "oh, it's that guy again".
Even if you're in incognito mode. There are enough things about your browser, your OS, your hardware to identify which browser it is (even if it is Anonymous Coward #67) without any cookies, even if multiple browsers come from the same IP address.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @10:51PM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 15 2021, @06:47PM
the dumb %$#^ used her iphone! Her, precious fucking iphone. if you use a normal smart phone OS (anything other than maybe graphene OS) to do anything that really requires privacy or security you're a dumb ass.