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CCTV is more analogous to a witness that provides a fixed point of view. Location data feels much closer to providing the point of view of the suspect and comes

CCTV is more analogous to a witness that provides a fixed point of view. Location data feels much closer to providing the point of view of the suspect and comes much closer, to my mind, to being protected by our 5th amendment rights to avoid self incrimination. Also, given that Google don't make it obvious when they're storing information in the phone or on their servers, information that intuitively feels like it's inside the phone should be protected by the 4th amendment's prohibitions on illegal searches. That's if the phone is owned by the suspect. If the phone is owned by the victim or anyone willing to give consent to search, I have no problem with police using it.

roywiggins 9y ago
> 4th amendment's prohibitions on illegal searches. The due process required by the 4th amendment is performed when the court issues a warrant, which they did here. If Google were providing this without a warrant, or in response to an NSL or the feds were using the 3rd-party doctrine to argue that these searches weren't protected by the 4th amendment then I'd be worried.
- curun1r 9y ago
  I get that existing case law is different, but I was providing my own interpretation of how I believe the 4th and 5th amendments should apply to a technology that the people who wrote those amendments could not have envisioned. I strongly believe that implementation details shouldn't be legal loopholes that allow law enforcement additional leeway. In this case, location information being stored on Google's servers is an implementation detail that isn't immediately obvious to non-technical people. > The due process required by the 4th amendment is performed when the court issues a warrant, which they did here The warrant was to search Google's servers, not the potential suspects' phones. What I'm saying is that I believe this data is logically part of the phone despite the fact that it resides on Google's servers because of the way that Google chose to implement their services. If they want to get a warrant for a specific person's phone because they believe the location information in the phone will prove that the suspect was in the area, that's different. But fishing for suspects using location data feels wrong to me. For one, it is almost guaranteed to also cover innocent people. Unless it's a remote area where only the perpetrator and victim were present, someone innocent will get unnecessarily dragged into the investigation.

roywiggins 9y ago

> 4th amendment's prohibitions on illegal searches. The due process required by the 4th amendment is performed when the court issues a warrant, which they did here. If Google were providing this without a warrant, or in response to an NSL or the feds were using the 3rd-party doctrine to argue that these searches weren't protected by the 4th amendment then I'd be worried.

curun1r 9y ago
I get that existing case law is different, but I was providing my own interpretation of how I believe the 4th and 5th amendments should apply to a technology that the people who wrote those amendments could not have envisioned. I strongly believe that implementation details shouldn't be legal loopholes that allow law enforcement additional leeway. In this case, location information being stored on Google's servers is an implementation detail that isn't immediately obvious to non-technical people. > The due process required by the 4th amendment is performed when the court issues a warrant, which they did here The warrant was to search Google's servers, not the potential suspects' phones. What I'm saying is that I believe this data is logically part of the phone despite the fact that it resides on Google's servers because of the way that Google chose to implement their services. If they want to get a warrant for a specific person's phone because they believe the location information in the phone will prove that the suspect was in the area, that's different. But fishing for suspects using location data feels wrong to me. For one, it is almost guaranteed to also cover innocent people. Unless it's a remote area where only the perpetrator and victim were present, someone innocent will get unnecessarily dragged into the investigation.