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3 raises a very interesting and somewhat concerning possibility. In the near future as AI develops more in the crime detection arena you may become a suspect fo

3 raises a very interesting and somewhat concerning possibility. In the near future as AI develops more in the crime detection arena you may become a suspect for crimes occurring in your geographical area based on things you are not doing or based on some set of states your smart devices have that match a statistical model of a suspicious person. The idea of becoming a suspect because you didn’t touch your smartphone during a particular timeframe is chilling.

bilbo0s 6y ago
This already happens, most of us just don't live in the neighborhoods where it happens. That's the unfortunate reality of today's America. It's also the reason that these techniques will be employed in a ubiquitous fashion in tomorrow's America. If we wanted to stop this, the time to complain was years ago when the practice was started in the drug war. Or even recently, when the practice was employed during the BLM riots. Any attempt to stop it now brings howls of racism. Causing police departments and other law enforcement agencies to double down on insisting that they use it on everyone in their attempts to prove the people screaming racism wrong.
- 13415 6y ago
  Like with any other form of surveillance, if it's a bad practice, then it shouldn't be used on anyone, regardless of race.
  - bilbo0s 6y ago
    Point is, the time to stop that particular practice was in its infancy. Waiting until the practice is both widespread and normalized is a losing strategy. The use of cell phone data is well understood, well litigated, and for all intents and purposes, settled law. To come along and unwind all that now is sisyphaean. We need to start getting out in front of the issues. Not reacting all the time. And certainly not allowing privacy violations that affect others, then trying to prevent the very same privacy violation from affecting our own. The people doing the violating are going to double down. They don't want their critics being proved right. They don't want to be accused of being hypocritical. So what are they going to do? As privacy activists, we need to make it easy for potential partners to cooperate with us. Right now, we're making it very difficult for potential partners to cooperate with us. We're putting potential partners in very difficult positions, and then asking why they won't support us?
    - Enginerrrd 6y ago
      This is unnecessarily defeatist. GPDR proved that you could get enough support for large scale walkback of thoroughly entrenched practices.
      - simple_phrases 6y ago
        The US isn't Europe, and in the US, law enforcement has undue influence in government and significant lobbying power. PBAs successfully lobbied to keep marijuana illegal all over the country, and it took public referendums to get it legalized in states that it is legal in. Even then, PBAs had undue influence in crafting legislation so that municipal police could still ticket and jail people in order to still generate revenue from marijuana possession and sale violations.
    - nitrogen 6y ago
      We need to start getting out in front of the issues. Not reacting all the time. It's kind of difficult when the privacy violations in question begin in secret. Consider police trying not to disclose their use of Stingrays, for example. I somehow doubt police departments and intelligence agencies are going to agree to run all future uses of tech by a privacy watchdog, so how do you suggest getting ahead of the problem?
      - vladTheInhaler 6y ago
        Well maybe we need to go over their heads then. That's supposed to be the purpose of the legislative branch - make rules about how the government is allowed to operate.
    - quasirandom 6y ago
      > The use of cell phone data is well understood, well litigated, and for all intents and purposes, settled law. I don't have strong views on the right policy outcome, but it is not accurate to call this issue well litigated and/or settled law. Just yesterday, NYTimes ran an article about DIA claiming a "commercial availability" exception to the only Supreme Court case addressing cell phone location data (Carpenter). If that is indeed DIA's rational, they are going to have some problems. For example, it is unlawful for the state to use commercially available thermal optics to surveil the interior of a dwelling without a warrant. I think DIA may be relying on dicta from Kyllo about devices in "common use", but their rational is secret so we won't know until it is... litigated. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/us/politics/dia-surveillance-data.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/us/politics/dia-surveilla...
  - xbmcuser 6y ago
    Thats his point this was being done years ago but white americans were not part of the demographic surveilled this way so didn't care now that they are and it gets stopped because of it then people accusing the police and government of racism are correct.
_underfl0w_ 6y ago
I recall (likely pre-covid) seeing a story posted here of some unsuspecting schmuck who became a suspect in a crime because his smart watch showed him circling near the area on his usual bike route. Scary times.
- Wistar 6y ago
  Perhaps this story about a Florida man and his fitness app data that "placed him" at the scene of a burglary because he had the misfortune of having ridden by the crime site three times during his ride? https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/7/21169533/florida-google-runkeeper-geofence-police-privacy https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/7/21169533/florida-google-ru...
- XorNot 6y ago
  Being a suspect does not mean you are guilty. Being arrested and charged does not mean you are guilty. This whole line of "what could go wrong!?" starts from a much deeper sickness in the way Americans view the criminal justice system.
  - djmips 6y ago
    It's almost become that arrested is conflated with guilty.
    - jki275 6y ago
      For a professional, being arrested for a major crime in America is a life ending event. Proving one's innocence once the powers that be have determined one to be guilty will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, will almost certainly mean loss of job, family and friends, etc. And you might still go to prison for the rest of your life anyway.
  - shkkmo 6y ago
    > This whole line of "what could go wrong!?" starts from a much deeper sickness in the way Americans view the criminal justice system The sickness is in how the criminal justice system works. Jury trials are a rare edgecase, most detminations of guilt are made by DAs. For most people in this country, being arrested and charged means you will be pushed into a plea deal and those that fight for their innocence face retaliatory harsh charges and sentencing.
simple_phrases 6y ago
ML is really good at picking up anomalies, and that is scary if, say, law enforcement or prosecutors are doing dragnet surveillance for anomalies in order to drum up charges.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago
  it's inherently scary if one is somewhat anomalous in behavior.
  - Wistar 6y ago
    Indeed. Witness all the folks who insisted Amanda Knox was guilty because she didn't act and look as they thought she should were she innocent.
- exporectomy 6y ago
  They already do that with their human brains. I've been stopped by the police for: - Sitting in a parked car in a suburban street for too long. - Going shopping at 2am. - Walking under a bridge at night. It's OK as long as they quickly realize you're harmless and leave you alone.
  - the8472 6y ago
    Human brains tend to be stateful, they can be talked to. And they're only deployed at small scale. AIs don't update and can be deployed at scale.
    - kordlessagain 6y ago
      > AIs don't update Currently.
  - ficklepickle 6y ago
    Policing in the USA, to a nearby outsider, appears to be more about enforcing societal norms than safety or laws. It seems to me they harass anyone they perceive to be abnormal. As a delightfully abnormal human, I'm very glad I was born just north of the 49th parallel. It's not perfect, but I do feel free to be myself.
exporectomy 6y ago
There's nothing wrong with that as long as the law enforcement is trustworthy and competent. We do want to catch criminals. That's the whole point of having law enforcement. It's funny that in America, people seem to have so given up on the idea of the police being honest and competent that all they want is to reduce their power. They don't seem to want reform and instead would rather suffer from crime than be investigated by the police. Becoming a suspect shouldn't be a scary thing to avoid. You should be able to just ignore your status and wait for the police to exclude you. But somehow it's a problem in America that people just accept.
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
  Because basing the system on the assumption that police will always be honest and competent is what got us into the situation we're in. Once bitten, twice shy.
  - exporectomy 6y ago
    I'm talking about accountability, not blind trust.
- satellite2 6y ago
  It's generally well accepted in the criminology field that you can reduce crime and that actually the most effective way to reduce crime happen well before and are not related to policing anyone. No one wants to suffer from crime by inaction.
- NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
  >There's nothing wrong with that as long as the law enforcement is trustworthy and competent "there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly" Neil Gaiman, American Gods
BurningFrog 6y ago
You can become a suspect for all sorts of random things you have no control over, like being near a crime, knowing certain people, etc. I don't see how it can work any other way.
- donkeyd 6y ago
  Which means there will be 100 suspects where usually there would be maybe 2. Which means the data is useless and therefore won't be used. Law enforcement doesn't want a system that incorrectly flags hundreds of people, unlike what some people seem to think. They want systems that reliably flag potential suspects, because that reduces work in stead of increasing it.
  - inefficient 6y ago
    That is only true if you assume they truly care about having the correct suspect rather than having a suspect they can get convicted. However, there is a long history of wrongful convictions and police and prosecutors using bad data to get them. Check out the Central Park Five for a big name one.
    - AWildC182 6y ago
      This. To put it simply, they like Precise data, not Accurate data. They want a bunch of data-points saying one thing and couldn't care less if it's objectively the right target, not a bunch of data points saying a bunch of things, one of which is actually right. Precision data gives them convictions and convictions give them promotions. As they say, any metric that becomes a target... This is why giving the police invasive surveillance tech is a terrible idea, they will only focus on the data that fits their narrative and discard the rest. The defense doesn't even need to know that any other data exists.
      - rbanffy 6y ago
        > They want a bunch of data-points saying one thing and couldn't care less if it's objectively the right target If your system produces data points with 8 significant digits of wrong data, we have two problems: the system and whoever approved the purchase. Any convictions will have to be corroborated by other evidence.
ashtonkem 6y ago
That’s already a thing, not a future possibility. Jogging too close to a crime can get your location subpoenaed from Google or whoever has it. Stories crop up on HN occasionally about this.
playingchanges 6y ago
I would think a warrant would still be required, so not as minority report as all that.
irrational 6y ago
You are a suspect because you do not own a smartphone.
- exhilaration 6y ago
  You don't need a smartphone to get tracked, even your flipphone reports its location, here's a wired article from 1998: https://www.wired.com/1998/01/e911-turns-cell-phones-into-tracking-devices/ https://www.wired.com/1998/01/e911-turns-cell-phones-into-tr...
konjin 6y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOA75NAoN6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOA75NAoN6Q There is a low tech solution to every problem. For a real world example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Igloo_White#Conclusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Igloo_White#Conclusi...
titzer 6y ago
Yet another reason to not let them normalize mass surveillance.

bilbo0s 6y ago

This already happens, most of us just don't live in the neighborhoods where it happens. That's the unfortunate reality of today's America. It's also the reason that these techniques will be employed in a ubiquitous fashion in tomorrow's America. If we wanted to stop this, the time to complain was years ago when the practice was started in the drug war. Or even recently, when the practice was employed during the BLM riots. Any attempt to stop it now brings howls of racism. Causing police departments and other law enforcement agencies to double down on insisting that they use it on everyone in their attempts to prove the people screaming racism wrong.

13415 6y ago
Like with any other form of surveillance, if it's a bad practice, then it shouldn't be used on anyone, regardless of race.
- bilbo0s 6y ago
  Point is, the time to stop that particular practice was in its infancy. Waiting until the practice is both widespread and normalized is a losing strategy. The use of cell phone data is well understood, well litigated, and for all intents and purposes, settled law. To come along and unwind all that now is sisyphaean. We need to start getting out in front of the issues. Not reacting all the time. And certainly not allowing privacy violations that affect others, then trying to prevent the very same privacy violation from affecting our own. The people doing the violating are going to double down. They don't want their critics being proved right. They don't want to be accused of being hypocritical. So what are they going to do? As privacy activists, we need to make it easy for potential partners to cooperate with us. Right now, we're making it very difficult for potential partners to cooperate with us. We're putting potential partners in very difficult positions, and then asking why they won't support us?
  - Enginerrrd 6y ago
    This is unnecessarily defeatist. GPDR proved that you could get enough support for large scale walkback of thoroughly entrenched practices.
    - simple_phrases 6y ago
      The US isn't Europe, and in the US, law enforcement has undue influence in government and significant lobbying power. PBAs successfully lobbied to keep marijuana illegal all over the country, and it took public referendums to get it legalized in states that it is legal in. Even then, PBAs had undue influence in crafting legislation so that municipal police could still ticket and jail people in order to still generate revenue from marijuana possession and sale violations.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    We need to start getting out in front of the issues. Not reacting all the time. It's kind of difficult when the privacy violations in question begin in secret. Consider police trying not to disclose their use of Stingrays, for example. I somehow doubt police departments and intelligence agencies are going to agree to run all future uses of tech by a privacy watchdog, so how do you suggest getting ahead of the problem?
    - vladTheInhaler 6y ago
      Well maybe we need to go over their heads then. That's supposed to be the purpose of the legislative branch - make rules about how the government is allowed to operate.
  - quasirandom 6y ago
    > The use of cell phone data is well understood, well litigated, and for all intents and purposes, settled law. I don't have strong views on the right policy outcome, but it is not accurate to call this issue well litigated and/or settled law. Just yesterday, NYTimes ran an article about DIA claiming a "commercial availability" exception to the only Supreme Court case addressing cell phone location data (Carpenter). If that is indeed DIA's rational, they are going to have some problems. For example, it is unlawful for the state to use commercially available thermal optics to surveil the interior of a dwelling without a warrant. I think DIA may be relying on dicta from Kyllo about devices in "common use", but their rational is secret so we won't know until it is... litigated. [1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/us/politics/dia-surveillance-data.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/22/us/politics/dia-surveilla...
- xbmcuser 6y ago
  Thats his point this was being done years ago but white americans were not part of the demographic surveilled this way so didn't care now that they are and it gets stopped because of it then people accusing the police and government of racism are correct.

_underfl0w_ 6y ago

I recall (likely pre-covid) seeing a story posted here of some unsuspecting schmuck who became a suspect in a crime because his smart watch showed him circling near the area on his usual bike route. Scary times.

Wistar 6y ago
Perhaps this story about a Florida man and his fitness app data that "placed him" at the scene of a burglary because he had the misfortune of having ridden by the crime site three times during his ride? https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/7/21169533/florida-google-runkeeper-geofence-police-privacy https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/7/21169533/florida-google-ru...
XorNot 6y ago
Being a suspect does not mean you are guilty. Being arrested and charged does not mean you are guilty. This whole line of "what could go wrong!?" starts from a much deeper sickness in the way Americans view the criminal justice system.
- djmips 6y ago
  It's almost become that arrested is conflated with guilty.
  - jki275 6y ago
    For a professional, being arrested for a major crime in America is a life ending event. Proving one's innocence once the powers that be have determined one to be guilty will cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, will almost certainly mean loss of job, family and friends, etc. And you might still go to prison for the rest of your life anyway.
- shkkmo 6y ago
  > This whole line of "what could go wrong!?" starts from a much deeper sickness in the way Americans view the criminal justice system The sickness is in how the criminal justice system works. Jury trials are a rare edgecase, most detminations of guilt are made by DAs. For most people in this country, being arrested and charged means you will be pushed into a plea deal and those that fight for their innocence face retaliatory harsh charges and sentencing.

simple_phrases 6y ago

ML is really good at picking up anomalies, and that is scary if, say, law enforcement or prosecutors are doing dragnet surveillance for anomalies in order to drum up charges.

bryanrasmussen 6y ago
it's inherently scary if one is somewhat anomalous in behavior.
- Wistar 6y ago
  Indeed. Witness all the folks who insisted Amanda Knox was guilty because she didn't act and look as they thought she should were she innocent.
exporectomy 6y ago
They already do that with their human brains. I've been stopped by the police for: - Sitting in a parked car in a suburban street for too long. - Going shopping at 2am. - Walking under a bridge at night. It's OK as long as they quickly realize you're harmless and leave you alone.
- the8472 6y ago
  Human brains tend to be stateful, they can be talked to. And they're only deployed at small scale. AIs don't update and can be deployed at scale.
  - kordlessagain 6y ago
    > AIs don't update Currently.
- ficklepickle 6y ago
  Policing in the USA, to a nearby outsider, appears to be more about enforcing societal norms than safety or laws. It seems to me they harass anyone they perceive to be abnormal. As a delightfully abnormal human, I'm very glad I was born just north of the 49th parallel. It's not perfect, but I do feel free to be myself.

exporectomy 6y ago

There's nothing wrong with that as long as the law enforcement is trustworthy and competent. We do want to catch criminals. That's the whole point of having law enforcement. It's funny that in America, people seem to have so given up on the idea of the police being honest and competent that all they want is to reduce their power. They don't seem to want reform and instead would rather suffer from crime than be investigated by the police. Becoming a suspect shouldn't be a scary thing to avoid. You should be able to just ignore your status and wait for the police to exclude you. But somehow it's a problem in America that people just accept.

HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
Because basing the system on the assumption that police will always be honest and competent is what got us into the situation we're in. Once bitten, twice shy.
- exporectomy 6y ago
  I'm talking about accountability, not blind trust.
satellite2 6y ago
It's generally well accepted in the criminology field that you can reduce crime and that actually the most effective way to reduce crime happen well before and are not related to policing anyone. No one wants to suffer from crime by inaction.
NotPavlovsDog 6y ago
>There's nothing wrong with that as long as the law enforcement is trustworthy and competent "there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly" Neil Gaiman, American Gods

BurningFrog 6y ago

You can become a suspect for all sorts of random things you have no control over, like being near a crime, knowing certain people, etc. I don't see how it can work any other way.

donkeyd 6y ago
Which means there will be 100 suspects where usually there would be maybe 2. Which means the data is useless and therefore won't be used. Law enforcement doesn't want a system that incorrectly flags hundreds of people, unlike what some people seem to think. They want systems that reliably flag potential suspects, because that reduces work in stead of increasing it.
- inefficient 6y ago
  That is only true if you assume they truly care about having the correct suspect rather than having a suspect they can get convicted. However, there is a long history of wrongful convictions and police and prosecutors using bad data to get them. Check out the Central Park Five for a big name one.
  - AWildC182 6y ago
    This. To put it simply, they like Precise data, not Accurate data. They want a bunch of data-points saying one thing and couldn't care less if it's objectively the right target, not a bunch of data points saying a bunch of things, one of which is actually right. Precision data gives them convictions and convictions give them promotions. As they say, any metric that becomes a target... This is why giving the police invasive surveillance tech is a terrible idea, they will only focus on the data that fits their narrative and discard the rest. The defense doesn't even need to know that any other data exists.
    - rbanffy 6y ago
      > They want a bunch of data-points saying one thing and couldn't care less if it's objectively the right target If your system produces data points with 8 significant digits of wrong data, we have two problems: the system and whoever approved the purchase. Any convictions will have to be corroborated by other evidence.

ashtonkem 6y ago

That’s already a thing, not a future possibility. Jogging too close to a crime can get your location subpoenaed from Google or whoever has it. Stories crop up on HN occasionally about this.

playingchanges 6y ago

I would think a warrant would still be required, so not as minority report as all that.

irrational 6y ago

You are a suspect because you do not own a smartphone.

exhilaration 6y ago
You don't need a smartphone to get tracked, even your flipphone reports its location, here's a wired article from 1998: https://www.wired.com/1998/01/e911-turns-cell-phones-into-tracking-devices/ https://www.wired.com/1998/01/e911-turns-cell-phones-into-tr...

konjin 6y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOA75NAoN6Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOA75NAoN6Q There is a low tech solution to every problem. For a real world example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Igloo_White#Conclusion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Igloo_White#Conclusi...

titzer 6y ago

Yet another reason to not let them normalize mass surveillance.