SoylentNews

Freeman [soylentnews.org] writes:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/cell-phones-users-cant-stop-incriminating-themselves/ [arstechnica.com]

“What kind of doctor was dr. pepper,” Utah real estate agent Kouri Richins once asked a search engine. [abc4.com] (Sadly, there was no actual Dr. Pepper. [wikipedia.org])

But it was Richins’ less innocuous online searches that helped a jury find her guilty of murdering her husband Eric via fentanyl overdose—and of hoping to collect life insurance policies she had opened in his name but without his knowledge.
[...]
it was her second iPhone that really made headlines. In April 2022, Kouri bought a replacement for her seized device and soon began searching for things which, at the very least, looked suspicious. Here are the five searches prosecutors decided to present to the jury during opening statements (which you can still watch on CourtTV) at Kouri’s trial earlier this year:

• “can you delete everytginv off an old iphind without actually having ut” [sic throughout]
• “can deleted text messages be retrieved from an iphone”
• “how.to.compleltley.wipe.a.iphkne.clear remotely”
• “can cops force you to do a lie detector test”
• “women utah prison”

[...]
The New York Times notes [nytimes.com] that a “forensic analysis of burner phones used by Ms. Richins showed searches for… ‘how long does life insurance companies takento.pay’ and ‘what is a lethal.does.of.fetanyl.’”
[...]
And a local news channel [abc4.com] said that she had accessed articles called “Signs of Being Under Federal Investigation” and “Delay in Claim Payment for Death Certificate with Pending Cause of Death.”
[...]
In HBO’s The Wire, criminal mastermind Stringer Bell famously had the good sense to know that one should not be “taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy.” But in case after case (after case!) that I cover, this is a lesson that defendants simply seem not to learn. Many will blab specific and even lurid details of their alleged crimes into search engines, text messages, and now AI tools [arstechnica.com].
[...]
there was the strange 2024 case from Minnesota in which Samantha Petersen, high on meth, hit an Amish buggy with her car.
[...]
The evidence against Samantha [nytimes.com] included, as usual, phone information, which revealed Internet searches for “what happens if you get in an accident with an Amish buggy and kill two people” and “if you hit a buggy and kill two people are you going to prison?”

Thanks to other phone data, this wasn’t a particularly tough case to crack.
[...]
Petersen pleaded guilty in 2025 [amishamerica.com] and was later sentenced to four years in prison [cbsnews.com].
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Examples can be multiplied almost infinitely.

Hanging out in “child free” subreddits and researching how hot a car must be to kill a child [cnn.com] might not seem suspicious until your young child turns up dead in a hot car days later.

This Internet evidence was used to help convict Justin Ross Harris of intentionally killing his son Cooper back in 2014. In 2022, however, the Georgia Supreme Court tossed out the murder verdict [gasupreme.us] (PDF), saying that prosecutors had introduced needlessly inflammatory and prejudicial material about Harris’ personal life at his trial.

What kind of material? Well, it too came from Harris’ phone. Harris had been sexting multiple women throughout the day his son died in the car, so prosecutors used “nine color pictures of Appellant’s erect penis that the State extracted from messages and blew up to full-page size as separate exhibits,” the court said.

Although this did have some relevance for establishing motive and state of mind, it was far too lurid and may have swayed the jury unreasonably, the court said.
[...]
But he didn’t get out of prison, because his phone had also revealed “lewd and sometimes illegal sexual messages and pictures with four minors,” which had landed him in jail on separate charges. He was finally released in 2025 [crimeonline.com].
[...]
From nude photos to questions about dead children and “luxury prisons for the rich,” our devices have become such a part of our lives that there is almost nothing people will not confide to them.
[...]
For years—as just one example—enough people have asked whether Facebook listens to your microphone without permission that the company has an official response [facebook.com].

But as examples like those above illustrate, there’s little reason for companies to resort to outright spying like this, because users simply can’t wait to divulge the most intimate details of their minds and bodies voluntarily. Even if you’re a privacy mode-using pro, your search history may be just a quick subpoena away.

Original Submission