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The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history
- sneak 5y agoReminder: Turn off location services/GPS systemwide to opt out of these databases. The subscriber location tracking performed by cell towers is much lower resolution.
- deadmutex 5y agoI am skeptical of using only technical solutions to non-technical problems. It rarely scales, IMO. Disclaimer: Work at Google, but opinions are my own.
- privacyisntdead 5y agoAgree. If we had better privacy laws, this wouldn't be an issue.
- marssaxman 5y agoCops don't care about the privacy laws which already exist. (See: parallel construction.) If we had better privacy laws, they would just get sneakier.
- JohnWhigham 5y agoYup, and even so, it's up to the defendant to prove themselves innocent, which will take tens of thousands of dollars just to get to the point where a judge throws the case out.
- upofadown 5y agoCops care deeply about what privacy laws exist. That still limits what data they can legitimately get access to. In this case they could of used a Stingray or equivalent but: * They would not of known where to place it before the crime took place. * Even if they somehow got the data about the location of the cyclist under the table they would have had no way to parallel construct anything. Since there was no other evidence that would of been it. This is not a new thing. The authorities can open and read your mail as much as they want using bamboo splints and/or the steam from a kettle. But because it is very illegal to do that it greatly reduces the abuse possible from such actions. Privacy laws are a prerequisite and are essential.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- tsjq 5y agogoogle android tracks location even when gps off https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+android+tracks+location+even+when+disabled+gps+off https://duckduckgo.com/?q=google+android+tracks+location+eve...
- ghastmaster 5y agoIt tracks which towers you are connected to according to the article. No triangulation or precise location.
- inetknght 5y agoCell phone tower triangulation has been around for so long that there's decades-old movies to its effect. To claim that there's no triangulation in current tech is, IMO, an intentionally malicious claim.
- greenhatman 5y agoIf it tracks signal strength as well, then it's just one extra step to triangulation.
- tpmx 5y agoTricky to use e.g. Google's Waze then.
- Syonyk 5y agoSo don't. Check traffic before you depart, pick a route, and leave some extra time in case you hit unexpected traffic. I know I've been going on about it lately, but for almost every "How can we possibly do this without an app tracking every bit of data it possibly can?" sort of task, people were doing that, or something functionally equivalent, before cell phones, or on cell phones that aren't actively user-hostile.
- sneak 5y agoChecking traffic before you depart also leaks your location, as well as your intended path of travel.
- KingMachiavelli 5y agoIt can not be used to prove that you actually did travel though. You can also put in only approximate address locations. Google isn't going to be running some inference algorithm to identify your most probable location or residence, they are just going to give LE the raw data. Unless you are a extremely wanted criminal, LE probably doesn't have the resources to do extensive analysis of google maps searches and a jury is not going to interpret those results the same way they would of actual location history.
- sneak 5y agoIf you get to the point where a jury is evaluating anything you have already lost.
- ghaff 5y agoSmartphones are useful but 15 years ago really weren't the Dark Ages because no one had a modern smartphone in their pocket. Even 25 years ago--before most people had cell phones at all--really weren't wither. Yes, I carry and use a smartphone. But it's a convenience. I don't need to reach people or have them reach me wherever I am. I don't need GPS at all times. I don't always need instant access to information.
- jimbob45 5y agoThe only foolproof method is to stick your phone in a Faraday cage both going to and leaving the location you want private, right? Or cage it and leave it at home?
- ARandomerDude 5y agoI can't find it now, but I read an article about the Capitol riot that said the FBI was actively looking for individuals whose phones followed the pattern you describe. Traveling towards the Capitol on Jan 6, going dark, later coming back online is perhaps an indicator the person didn't want to be observed at the Capitol. Likewise, traveling to D.C., and leaving the phone at the hotel all day, then moving in the evening was an indicator the person may have been at the Capitol. I bring this up to say, Faraday cage and leaving the phone behind may not even be enough with a sufficiently large surveillance state. Edit: leaving the phone at home is different than a hotel, of course. But even that might raise too much suspicion unless you frequently, and randomly, leave it at home. That way the lack of movement wouldn't necessarily indicate you didn't want to be tracked at a particular moment.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- jimbob45 5y agoI heard the same thing from Alan Dershowitz on Preet Bharara's podcast. I think you'd certainly need to keep your phone dark for long periods of time prior to the event and possibly have someone briefly unsheath it from the cage for plausible deniability. Even so, you're only ensuring that the prosecution can't use that piece of evidence against you - you're not exonerating yourself entirely by any stretch.
- UweSchmidt 5y agoThings are probably not quite there yet, but... How about a real-time analysis of all security camera footage and everyone's photos and videos, using face recognition and other techniques (movement, clothes associated with a person etc.). Cars are tracked via license plate, if they are not online now anyway. You pay cash but "they" know the serial number of the bill the ATM gave to you and which shop owner gave it back to the bank a little later. There are probably many patterns that are only known to people who do this kind of thing full time. Maybe there is a very small number of people who buy the very same two items at a gas station. If Amazon knows who's pregnant early, some will know who's trying to go private and why before they know it...
- yardie 5y agoThe subscriber location tracking performed by cell towers is part of the e911 system. It's pretty accurate by design. Now how much and how long that data is retained is up to the mobile network provider. They've had no qualms about selling it in the past.
- dartharva 5y agoI've always had the habit of keeping Location services turned off while not in use, to conserve my phone's battery. Guess it's a privacy requisite now. I also remember having a habit of keeping mobile data off during the 3G days. Guess it's not feasible anymore.
- izacus 5y agoThat does practically nothing for your privacy, because you're still connected to the base station tower which keeps logs of your phone roaming between base stations. And in more populated areas, the base stations are dense enough to be pretty accurate about where you were. Requests for cell tower log dumps are very common these days. The solution here is for governments to ban this kind of bulk data requests without warrant and not for you to fight a losing battle against your own police force.
- lrem 5y agoDisclaimer: I'm a Googler, but thankfully not dealing with any of this. Well, it won't stop the police. But the accuracy is lower, increasing the number of people that match the geofence. That changes the cost-benefit of asking for such a warrant.
- izacus 5y agoIt might be just my eastern european paranoia, but this just makes it easier for the authorities to put you into a place they want you to be, not harder.
- throwaway0a5e 5y agoWhich is better depends on if your threat model is them targeting you specifically and then looking for pretexts or them deciding they want to target you specifically when looking through the contents of the dragnet.
- jjoonathan 5y ago
- dawnerd 5y agoIs there a self hosted app to track your location? I use Google maps to keep granular history so I can use it later for whatever. But if I could self host that’d be better.
- privong 5y agoThere are standalone GPS loggers that lack transmitters and log location to SD cards in CSV / GPX formats (e.g., [0]). It's one more thing to carry, but it's small and you can be reasonably confident that it won't transmit your location to anyone. But the particular one I've posted doesn't have the ability to encrypt the data as its being saved, so if someone physically steals the device, they'll have easy access to your past location history. [0] https://canadagps.ca/collections/gps-data-logger/products/columbus-v-990-gps-data-logger-microsd-slot-4gb-capacity-50-million-waypoints-voice-tag-g-sensor-66-channels-mtk2-chipset-windows-mac-linux-compatible https://canadagps.ca/collections/gps-data-logger/products/co...
- tyingq 5y agoSee UnifiedNLP (https://github.com/microg/UnifiedNlp/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/microg/UnifiedNlp/blob/master/README.md) <ctrl-f> down to "List of backends for geolocation".
- literallyaduck 5y agoLook at Automatic Packet Reporting System (APRS) you will find lots of tools related to telemetry.
- shivam543 5y agoYou can self-host nextcloud and try phonetrack app. https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/phonetrack https://apps.nextcloud.com/apps/phonetrack
- hundchenkatze 5y agoThere's Trackbook for Android. It records locally to a GPX file and also has the option to use GPS only. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.y20k.trackbook/ https://f-droid.org/en/packages/org.y20k.trackbook/ https://github.com/y20k/trackbook https://github.com/y20k/trackbook
- 123pie123 5y agoit will end up as a cat and mouse game surely poeple who are up to no good, would just turn off their phone - possibly taking the battery out or placing it in a foiled bag. or give it to another person or even hide it somewhere else doesn't seem very hard to circumvent
- ProjectArcturis 5y agoThe vast, vast majority of criminals are too dumb to do any of that.
- pessimizer 5y agoBut we don't need new tools to catch criminals who were always easy to catch.
- nitrogen 5y agoThe ones that get caught, at least. I worry that availability bias makes it hard to know what "true" crime looks like, so we end up chasing the wrong things.
- mywittyname 5y agoPeople have gotten away with heinous crimes for decades, only to ever be caught by chance. There are a staggering amount of unsolved murders and missing persons who have never been found. Even white collar crimes with clear paper trails can go on for decades. As long as you're not committing a high profile crime, and you make a informed effort to minimize and/or erase as much evidence as possible, you're pretty likely to get away with a crime.
- raxxorrax 5y agoAnd they never teach that in schools.
- gknoy 5y agoThe issue is if you're doing something illegal that you don't know are illegal, but are one of the small number of people in the geofenced area. We don't even have to be guilty, the police just have to _think_ you are guilty for them to make you have a bad day.
- literallyaduck 5y agoPhones are a liability.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoEspecially for criminals.
- pessimizer 5y agoLike homosexuals, insulters of the King, and apostates.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- bequanna 5y ago…or anyone who opposes the politics of the current regime.
- rufus_foreman 5y ago>> Phones are a liability them: I'd like you to carry this tracking device with you everywhere you go. It tracks your location down to a few meters. It tracks who you talk to and records your conversations. It tracks what you spend your money on. It sends us all this information, we save it, and provide it to the government when they ask. How about that? us: That's Orwellian. It's a complete violation of privacy and likely illegal. I would never consent to that. them: You can take selfies with it and play Cow Clicker on it. us: I'll give you $500 for it. them: There's a more expensive version where when people message you you can see if they are using the cheap version or the expensive version. us: I'll give you $1000 for the expensive version. them: The "pro" version takes better selfies. us: I'll give you $1500 for the "pro" version. them: You can only store 75,000 selfies on the "pro" version but you can upgrade to storage for 300,000 selfies. us: I'll give you $2000 for the upgraded version. them, 6 months later: There's a new tracking device out, it's the same as the one you have but it comes in Sierra Blue. us: I'll give you another $2000. them: But wait! There's more!
- ghastmaster 5y agoGeofence warrants are analogous to getting a warrant for the check-in log at a hotel after a guest is murdered. So long as there is probable cause, this should not be a legal issue. See https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/probable_cause https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/probable_cause: > A judge may issue a search warrant if the affidavit in support of the warrant offers sufficient credible information to establish probable cause. When you use these types of technology, you are essentially checking in everywhere you go.
- the-dude 5y agoNot in my hometown in The Netherlands. We had a high profile murder by stabbing, a suspect and the police was denied the information you are talking about ( I think ). The case was high profile because the victim was in his early twenties and seemed to be stabbed 'at random' during his jogging.
- ghastmaster 5y agoDo you know why the information was not provided? What legal basis?
- ziddoap 5y agoNot agreeing or disagreeing, but the essential nuance here is your last few words: you're now checking-in literally everywhere, at all times. This makes the analogy of a hotel logbook a bit less apt (well, a lot less). If I check into a hotel, I'm not also checking in to every other store/attraction/place on that trip, as well as every few steps I take, as well as every place that I look up on a map to see if I want to visit (i.e. search history).
- nullc 5y agoGeofence warrants are more analogous to getting a warrant to check the surface thoughts of everyone in a certain area. We just don't yet have brain implants allowing our corporate overlords to directly log our surface thoughts yet, for now they only capture them via backscatter in our search queries.
- belter 5y ago4 layers of Aluminium foil :-)) https://youtu.be/tVFJJEiJ1C0 https://youtu.be/tVFJJEiJ1C0
- dylan604 5y agoOh my the comments for that video are fun
- JohnWhigham 5y agoDuring school some friends and I lived above our landlord who prohibited Wi-Fi, saying it gave him headaches. One time I accidentally used the Wi-Fi adapter for my Xbox 360, and he came up a half hour later with a sniffer demanding us to shut off the source. Never figured out if it actually caused him headaches, or if he just didn't want any sources on around him. He later moved to the middle of nowhere in West Virgina, and I remember reading a few months later about a community out there that surrounded themselves with a Faraday Cage. Wonder if anyone ever told him about radio waves...or light in general.
- judge2020 5y agoEHS (electromagnetic hypersensitivity) has no scientific basis whatsoever. There have been blind studies that show no correlation between such exposure and supposed symptoms[0], so anyone with symptoms might only have a subconscious psychological response to knowledge of being around EMF. 0: https://doi.org/10.1097/01.psy.0000155664.13300.64 https://doi.org/10.1097/01.psy.0000155664.13300.64
- yardie 5y agoThere is the National Radio Quiet Zone [0] around the Green Bank Radio Observatory in West Virginia. But there isn't a giant Faraday Cage. That would be stupidly expensive to build. I met a few people who willingly moved to the area to get away from perceived RF radiation for health reasons. Transmitters aren't banned but they are highly regulated to run at limited power. The same area is also popular with pot growers so you get an interesting mix of hippies, potheads, preppers, and people like your landlord. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Quiet_Zone https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_National_Radio_Q...
- twofornone 5y agoIts only a matter of time before the wrong people get their hands on all the data that big tech has been unscrupulously mining for years now. An authoritarian's wet dream. Im typically a minimal regulation kind of guy but these orgs have consistently demonstrated that without some sort of effective privacy regulation, modern tech companies simply do not have enough incentive to self-regulate with respect to data collection. Laymen are too ignorant to demand better from the modern data cartel.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoData brokers have been building detailed personal profiles of everyone for fifty years. The Googles are just the new kids at the party. A major reason we don't have strong data privacy law is to protect this business model and maintain the surveillance apparatus it enables.
- badRNG 5y agoI think there are generic non-surveillance reasons as well. Whenever an industry gets big enough (tobacco, oil, advertising) it can have enough momentum and capital to have its interests protected by the state to a degree that anything short of an energized mass movement will fail to see these industries regulated (a good example of such a movement having some success is tobacco.)
- mywittyname 5y agoMost people don't know the names of the worst offenders.
- throwawaymanbot 5y agoalready happened/Happens.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- MichaelMoser123 5y agoThat's what you have in Russia, operators are obliged to collect and store vast amounts of data under the SORM laws, and then bellingcat were able to access all this data in their investigations, that's how they got the location trail of the agents that shaddowed and poisened Navalny (and others). Bellingcat got all that data from a black market on data, where low profile employees are selling access to all this gathered data for a couple of dimes, see [3]. I wonder if a similar black data market is already in place in other countries... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Poisoning_of_Alexei_Navalny_and_others https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellingcat#Poisoning_of_Alexei... [3] https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-fsb-methodology/ https://www.bellingcat.com/resources/2020/12/14/navalny-fsb-...
- gootler 5y agoGood! We need more of this. So tired of the crooks getting away with it. All the BLM assholes who got free shit last year should be in jail. They stole and made inflation go way up. Somebody's gotta pay, and it's the honest people.
- motohagiography 5y agoAt some point it's going to click that the issue isn't the technical confidentiality of data, it's the people who leverage it against you (and those who enable them) who are the real problem.
- judge2020 5y agoWell, yes, but if you go after the people in the news, all the random data brokerage companies in the shadows get off scot-free and continue doing their own data harvesting. You also can't punish people for leveraging data against you if there's no law for either holding such data or using it for societally-bad purposes.
- AlbertCory 5y agoSomeone (Eric Schmidt? not sure) once said, "If you really want something to be private, don't put it on a computer." Still the best advice. Rather than storing it and then worrying about where it goes, just don't store it.
- dimitrios1 5y agoDon't put it on a computer, don't say it within earshot of a computer, and don't have it visible to any computer's camera: getting pretty impossible to follow this advice.
- f38zf5vdt 5y agoHow do I turn off my existence?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- genewitch 5y agoPsychedelics?
- asquabventured 5y ago> Don't put it on a computer, don't say it within earshot of a computer, and don't have it visible to any computer's camera: getting pretty impossible to follow this advice. I predict an increase in the number of golfers and boat enthusiasts in my lifetime.
- dang 5y agoRelated past threads. Others? Google says geofence warrants make up one-quarter of all US demands - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28266650 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28266650 - Aug 2021 (259 comments) New Federal Court Rulings Find Geofence Warrants Unconstitutional - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24342049 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24342049 - Sept 2020 (29 comments) Google Gives Feds 1,500 Phone Locations in Unprecedented ‘Geofence’ Search - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21773543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21773543 - Dec 2019 (269 comments)
- darthvoldemort 5y agoIf I don't allow my search history to be stored by Google, can police still search it?
- rastafang 5y agoA safe guess would be that Google only hides it from yourself.
- judge2020 5y agoNo protections occur when private citizens (or companies) give up information to police voluntarily, so the police aren't "searching" anything, in the legal sense of them needing probable cause to obtain information on you. The only way to stop them from getting anything from Google is to not use Google (and Bing, Yahoo, etc). If Google can tie incognito searches to your name (eg. via IP association), they likely will turn it over in these data requests.
- midnightGhost 5y agoI remember that story about Zachary McCoy. This whole thing continues to get worse quick and will continue to get worse. I know people say we need legislation and regulation on data privacy and tech companies which we do. But before that gets taken seriously (at least in the US) it's going to take something real scandalous done by tech companies and actually affect the common folk where they actually start to care. Right now the average user does not care at all about security and privacy except the small niche groups of us on HN, Reddit and other tech/Geek forums. The regular average user will continue to still use Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple etc. As long as the average user keeps using their services and vote with their data and wallets I doubt much will change anytime soon. Until we get some real data privacy laws and regulation we just have to matters into our own hands. I don't use Google search unless I need to, and always have my VPN on (Mullvad). Edit: Then again, once we did get data privacy laws and regulation could we actually trust the companies and politicians and LE. Probably not. That's why I also feel the laws and regulation needed for tech is more of like a "The public thinks we did something" type of situation. There will still and always will be under the table deals. If the regular user can realize eventually how they feed these companies with their data and what happens with their data it could also hinder or start to hinder data collection at the government level (NSA, GCHQ, Project Raven and so on).
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y agoWhat about raising money to buy a bunch of data from, say, the Washington, D.C. area and then de-anonymizing it. I wonder what we'd learn...
- bradlys 5y agoI really doubt legislation would come into effect. Instead, the people organizing the effort will be hunted down, prosecuted, and turned into examples of what happens when you try to fuck with people in high level government positions.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y agoThat's a coordinated response. We don't want to invoke a coordinated response. Pick some prominent people to make examples of--people who will make many others happy by their embarassment.
- KingMachiavelli 5y agoWhat is really surprising is law enforcement actually investigated a burglary and went as far as requesting data from Google.
- sixothree 5y agoI’m guessing the victim was in law enforcement.
- ram_rar 5y ago> McCoy later found out the request was part of an investigation into the burglary of a nearby home the year before Just wondering, if he would have still shown up in the search results, if he had setup auto deleting Google data older than 3 months.
- uhtred 5y agoJust don't use Google?! Seriously, it's not that hard to remove google from your personal life. If your job makes you use google, just view your email using the web app or use an email client on phone.
- Clubber 5y agoSure, but Google is just one way to collect that data. You'd have to get rid of your cell phone, or at least not carry it around. Better make sure your car doesn't have OnStar or any other similar tracking device built in too. Once facial recognition goes mainstream, you're pretty hosed regardless of what you do.
- uhtred 5y agoIf the guy in this story had a google free phone he presumably wouldn't have been caught in the net. I don't think cell tower location tracking is accurate enough that the cops would have used it in this case. For privacy, don't use google (or apple). For anonymity, leave your phone at home.
- titzer 5y ago1. Turn off Google location history. 2. Disable all Google apps' access to your location. 3. Disable Android's "high accuracy location" if possible in your Android version. This little snitch collects terrifyingly precise "anonymized" location information fused with device sensors. Do not accept surveillance in the name of convenience. And don't let Google normalize even more intrusion into our lives. Don't use their services.
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y agoAnd, I might add, consider GrapheneOS and CalyxOS as alternative operating systems for your Pixel phone. https://grapheneos.org/ https://grapheneos.org/ https://calyxos.org/ https://calyxos.org/ GrapheneOS is more security-focused, CalyxOS is more privacy-focused, and they're both a step in the right direction.
- sphinxcdi 5y agoGrapheneOS isn't less focused on privacy than security or than the other one. They recently made a thread addressing this: https://twitter.com/GrapheneOS/status/1424412990074494979 https://twitter.com/GrapheneOS/status/1424412990074494979
- NoImmatureAdHom 5y agoYou're probably right. They have different philosophies and threat models.
- Razengan 5y agoAnd whenever you sign into any Google app or service, delete all Google cookies afterwards, to prevent the automatic shared sign-in into Google Search. Fuck that scummy pattern really.
- jdavis703 5y agoI actually prefer auto-sign in. I don’t want to do the whole 2-factor rigmarole in a dozen different apps. Perhaps they can make it an option though.
- ir77 5y agoIs this only unique to Google? Serious question - I switched from google to iPhone exactly for the tracking reasons, but I would think that apple does have similar data - if you have weather widget it must ping something, same thing with Maps and that’s not even accounting if you allow gps to set your time zone or collect traffic data. Are the cops not searching apple data? Is it just not public enough? Or is the data pretty poor even if they wanted to search but can’t.
- graeme 5y agoAccording to this from 2018, no, Apple isn't storing that data. At least if this release is comprehensive, and it seems to be. https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-request/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/apple-data-collection-stored-r...
- dudus 5y agoIn theory this data is also available from carriers. But Google can keep record of your gps if you enable that. I think switching to apple is a bit of overreaction over this. You are able to disable location tracking on Google.
- ir77 5y agoYes, you can, but then you can’t use google assistant, not even to dial your favorite contacts and you constantly get harassed by google to enable it, this was also on a pixel phone. Google assistant couldn’t even make a call with the allo app, there were many reasons I switched. Actually I was always and iPhone user and tried pixel 2 for a few month and that was it.
- kevin_thibedeau 5y agoYou can restrict retention to three months as a compromise.
- tessierashpool 5y agoas far as GPS, you can just turn off location tracking on iPhone when you don't need it. they make it more work than it should be, but it's not hard, and it is amazing for battery life.
- mercora 5y agodoes it work both ways? can i present this data as an alibi when i need one? if its not deemed accurate for that why would it be considered for evidence? and if it is that seems like free alibis for everyone guilty or not ;)
- daenz 5y agoWhich do you think is more important? Needing to present an alibi in the case of you being wrongly accused? Or needing to conceal your actions in a world where something new has been made illegal?
- mercora 5y agoi just tried to point out this data should be useless for prosecution. this could easily be faked to make up an alibi when you are correctly accused of something.
- pixl97 5y agoIn the US you are innocent until accused. Police organizations and the FBI love to come in and question the people around you with very pointed questionnaires that can make it seem like you are a very bad person. The number of guilty people that get off by it would be irrelevant compared to the number of innocents that become stigmatized by their peers.
- vkou 5y agoWhich do you think is more important? An innocent person being able to prove their innocence, or a criminal being able to conceal their crimes? The entire millenium-old body of law surrounding what rights you have when dealing with the police exists in order to protect the innocent, not the guilty. Things like warrants don't exist to make it impossible for the police to do their work. They exist to make it so that they spend less[1] time harassing people who have done nothing wrong. It's difficult to frame the police scooping up data that a third party has on you as harassment. [1] But not no.
- tu7001 5y agoI think crimination of nearly all abortion is a good thing, cause an abortion is a murder.
- dang 5y agoYou've been repeatedly breaking the site guidelines by using HN for ideological battle. We ban such accounts, regardless of the ideology they favor, so please stop. It's not what this site is for. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- nullc 5y agoThey've been doing this for going on 20 years now. Long ago someone stole a $1000 note out of a safe. Local sheriff's office asked Google for everyone in the area that recently did a search for them--- got back pages and pages of results because some TV show had an episode about them. If your search history doesn't give you anxiety you're not cynical enough.
- dotBen 5y agoRemember, the US Government only needs a warrant if you are a "US Person" (which is a US citizen anywhere in the world or a person of any nationality physically located within America). We learned from the Snowden leaks that the US government constitutionally doesn't need a warrant to request any of this information if you are outside of the US if Google is holding the data domestically on servers in the US. And it makes so many of these requests Google has self-service systems for the US government to access accounts of non-US-persons directly. This is probably happening all the time for non-Americans.
- nyolfen 5y agowe also learned that it sidesteps this by collecting data on UK persons and exchanging it with GCHQ, who does likewise
- bob229 5y agoNever. Use. Google. Delays all social media now
- PorterDuff 5y agoI'm sitting at the ER right now wondering what sort of ads I'll get. Truth is you can't count on government to restrict itself so you have to buy your own privacy.
- rastafang 5y agoWould it be possible to create a US city where it would be illegal?
- unixhero 5y agoThis is harrowing. What do we do?
- dandare 5y agoWould switching Location History off help in this case? And why can't governments use data from mobile network providers? The BTS towers know your location at all times.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y agoVelcome to ze dragnet, lil' fishies! Don't splash too much. …o°O·°
- ionwake 5y agoI’m so clueless about law in general if one of these geo fence thingies occur how do you even find a lawyer who understands and knows how to stop it ? I mean you do google for a cyber lawyer or something ?
- salawat 5y agoYou don't know about it until the cops show up at your door. Technically, a judge should have put the kebash on it as a fishing expedition. However, it's rendered "reasonable" by Third Party Doctrine.
- specialist 5y agoRant: Ugh. People still don't grok the privacy situation wrt law enforcement. Here's me trying yet again trying to convey my understanding. Our prior legal notions are moot when the "dragnet" is the entire planet, encompassing all people for all space and time. Folk understanding of legal notions like probable cause, reasonable doubt, burden of proof, innocent until proven guilty, alibis, etc. no longer apply. Identifying suspects and checking their alibis is obsolete. Law enforcement will use big data to rule out non-suspects. Then whoever is left must be the perp. In the case of Zachary McCoy in this article, LE found a match. What I'm saying is in the near future, LE will rule out non-matches. So if LE can't establish an alibi for you, globally, you're a potential suspect. Reverse strategy, same end result. But bigger scope. In the mid-aughts, law enforcement was already using warehoused demographic data to solve cold cases. Imagine how much better they can do their job today. (And yet so many crimes go unsolved. All the downside of forfeiting our privacy, none of the benefits. Infuriating.) ACLU's objection to Apple's CSAM effort hit HN's front page last week. Perfect example of preparing to fight the last war. The ACLU, like most everyone else, still hasn't internalized what's happening/happened. Forgive me, I still can't articulate my notions about privacy very well. Despite 20+ years of effort. Even when I try talk to other privacy advocates. When I try to simply example the technical capabilities of various players, and what that might mean, I'm dismissed as "paranoid, sweaty kook". (Actual quote from a local newspaper.) When I write that I don't know what privacy even means any more, I'm dead serious. My only kindred spirit, matching my pessimism, has been Shoshana Zuboff (author of Surveillance Capitalism). I remain open the possibility that I am in fact insane.
- salawat 5y agoYou are not insane. The part you have trouble articulating I think revolves around 3rd Party Doctrine, and the complete seeming death of professional discretion. When I was growing up, you wanted to keep records? Paper, or get out. So people only tracked the important things. Queries happened at the speed of a human being able to synthesize information, etc. Further, if you wanted to cross-reference different sources, you were doing footwork, which meant you were doing that one thing at a time. Nowadays, we've massively parallelized the data collection, classification, cleaning, organizing, and cross-referencing to the degree that about the only thing standing in your way is learning the names of providers with the juiciest datasets. The Internet did it's original job maybe a bit too well. Information is propagated without any sense of discretion in the name of financial viability. Walking things back... Well... The only option is to destroy the data itself. By it's very existence, by collecting it, it destroys any semblance of privacy. Cellular technology in particular is a glaring example of a set of data that never should have been made queryable, but here we are.
- haspoken 5y agohttps://archive.is/WGEtj https://archive.is/WGEtj