Unfortunately you've fallen for their ruse. Location history in Google applications is not the issue. There is a completely different mechanism built into Google's rootkit on every phone, known as Google Play Services. It collects "anonymous" location data through the operation of Google Location Service (GLS) bundled with Android. It's the thing that provides "high accuracy" location.
This is not tied to Google applications, your account, etc. It's in the system software. It is underneath everything and it basically services all location requests from all apps.
Because Google believes this is anonymized data, it doesn't feel that you should have well-labeled controls over it.
To disable this data collection, you must disable "High accuracy location" in Android systems menus.
There's a reason why there is a click-through agreement. It constitutes "consent" in the eyes of Google lawyers.
This data must not show up in geofenced warrants though, the topic of this thread? Otherwise, it clearly isn't anonymized (or it isn't useful to law enforcement requesting the data anyways).
High accuracy location data is not difficult to de-anonymize. Your phone sleeps at your house and goes to work with you, two enormous windows of time that generate huge numbers of 4d points that identify you uniquely. It doesn't even need crazy AI/machine learning.
> This data must not show up in geofenced warrants though
Who knows...the public does not know exactly what Google is required to do to comply with these requests, nor how it implements these "queries". And then there are NSLs, which is a whole other level of batshit-insane secrecy, where Google can't even confirm or deny they've even received a NSL. They only voluntarily offer the number of NSLs they receive annually, not on how many they comply with.
Technical details are important. The public cannot reason about this issue when the players intentionally perpetuate our ignorance. This is by design, and that itself is a gross violation of our human rights. Instead, all we have is vague assurances of powerful institutions who do not have our best interest at heart.
I've always left "location history" turned off, never found it useful enough to turn on at all... BUT I don't understand if that's even enough to prevent Google from having the records that can be accessed via warrant.
I have "location history" off, but I have "location services" ON, to allow for instance Google Maps to know my current location. THAT is useful enough I'd have trouble doing without it, Google Maps knowing my location (or uber, tinder, etc, things that won't work without it).
It's unclear to me leaving "location services" is enough to create the records that can be accessed with a geofence warrant? Even with "location history" off entirely/purged?
The article says: "collected from users’ phones when they use an Android device with location data switched on"
It doesn't sound like deleting old location history, or even turning off location history entirely will actually limit anything at all for these warrants?
Actually turning off location services might, but if you find it inconvenient to even turn off "location history", I don't think you'll like that solution much...
It’s fair to assume that every single interaction you have with any major website is logged and stored, and disabling any “history” features etc is only for yourself, eg if you’re on a shared computer.
There’s absolutely no way any of the FAANGs would let you use their service without harvesting your data. It’s their reason for existing and any other “features” (like search, maps, video) is just the carrot to get you there.
That said google at least and I think Microsoft anonymizes a bit after I think 18 months or so, and does the last bits of an IP address before anything is written to disk on the google analytics side.
This is both the best organic example of FUD I've seen since Slashdot articles on Microsoft during the Windows/Linux battles 20 years ago, and an excellent example of the black hole nihilism of 2010s HN on data - free, fantastic tools used by billions are reduced to a "carrot" for "data harvesting"
I agree with your conclusion that turning off location history will not protect you from inclusion in these warrants.
Another quote from the article:
> In 2018, the Associated Press reported that Google could still collect users’ locations even when their location history is “paused.”
If you have web and app activity off this is probably not true and the AP is lying.
If you turn off location services on device, also probably not true and the AP is lying.
If you run location services set to ON at device level and you have App Activity tracking set to ON then location will be tracked.
Note that a fair number of users like these features. Google starts suggesting common destinations based on starting destination in Maps, Weather apps will remember the most recent location weather was checked from and much more.
I know how to turn "Location Services" on and off. I know how to turn "Location History" on and off, as well as use Google's interface to delete my current history. I can't find anything on Android "App Activity tracking".
But we're specifically talking about having "Location Services" on, but "Location History" off, that's what the article suggests is being recorded and available for warrant anyway. Since the posts at the top of the thread was suggesting deleting your "Location History" data -- but the article seems to suggest that if you still have "Location Services" on, it's still recording you and available for warrant. I don't think there is any reporting that standard Android/Google record you available for warrant if "Location Services" is turned off though.
It definitely makes it more confusing that there are several different settings/services, each of which may be called slightly different names in slightly different places, and it's not always clear how they interact with regard to what information Google is actually recording. That is part of what's making this conversation confusing and I'm not sure we're all talking about the same things when we think we are.
"App Activity tracking" is a term that's confusing me. Do you mean this as a synonym for "Location History" and/or "Location Services", or is this a separate thing?
Location services is the device level control. You can pick which devices pump locations out and turn it off entirely for a device if desired. Google only tracks location from a device if you give them the OK (most do for maps / weather etc). Then they use that location to communicate with their servers and serve you the data you want that is location based. This location (and they enrich it with wifi stuff etc) is available to all apps on your device that have permission to use it plus all server they connect with that use it.
Because they will track location at app level across both play and ios etc. So even if you are on a device WITHOUT location service, google may still be getting your location data through an app on the device.
I used to have that off, but I actually found I liked getting the various suggestions (google figures out your commutes and common destinations based on starting points from what I could see - pretty convenient).
I keep location services off unless I'm actively using Google Maps for navigation (you don't need to turn it on to just look at a map of an area). I'd be more comfortable if my phone had a kill switch for GPS, but it doesn't.
Does it even matter when your location is also available from the mobile carriers? Best solution is if you value privacy is not to carry a phone on you.
Well, the article suggests that law enforcement -- mainly state and local -- is getting it from Google via "geofencing" warrants, "give me all the people who were in this area at this time". Getting it from google and not mobile carriers.
It would probably be a lot harder for them to get it from mobile carriers. There are multiple mobile carriers. They may not have the systems from which they could easily give law enforcement that data (Google has them, and uses the to respond).
Making things harder for law enforcement matters. But yes, of course you are more secure without your phone on you. (Then let's talk about the universal camera surveillance we have, and facial recognition... it is hard to be invisible in 2021, but that does not mean all venues are equal, it matters when you make it as easy as it is with a geofence warrant to Google).
>It would probably be a lot harder for them to get it from mobile carriers. There are multiple mobile carriers. They may not have the systems from which they could easily give law enforcement that data (Google has them, and uses the to respond).
Rather, there are laws governing what data police may request under what circumstances from mobile carriers. They can either follow the rules and do all the paperwork to get data from the phone companies or they can request location data from Google, which is just as good for most purposes and much easier to obtain.
Huh, why don't these laws apply to Google? I'm interested in learning more, can you be more specific about what laws covering what data police may request apply to mobile carriers but not google, so I can learn more?
I think you will find, if you deep dive, that this is less about statutes passed by Congress and more about case law/jurisprudence derived from case rulings.
Also important is that these are not two giant melting pots silos of data. Your mobile phone provider has multiple types of data that require differing burden of proof for LEOs to access. Some require an actual warrant, whereas others may be obtained simply by asking or purchasing (due to the Third Party Doctrine).
Similarly, Google has massive troves of different kinds of data. Your Search Queries may not have the same level of protection as access to your Google Maps location data which may differ from WiFi wardriving, which may differ from Google Phone account data, etc.
Historically, land lines had very stringent protections in US law. A “Tap and Trace” warrant had specific burden of proof and requirements for LEOs who listened in (there were fantastic scenes in the Sopranos and The Wire that showed criminals frustrating police while being spied on), but I believe mobile phone call content is governed by different statutes.
Cell tower data is much less granular than GPS data collected by apps. Google knows that you were on the same block where a crime was committed, but mobile carriers only know you were in the city or neighborhood.
Each time a phone connects to a cell site, it generates a time-stamped record known as cell-site location information (CSLI). Wireless carriers collect and store this information for their own business purposes.
[...]
With just the click of a button, the Government can access each carrier’s deep repository of historical location information at practically no expense.
[...]
With access to CSLI, the Government can now travel back in time to retrace a person’s whereabouts, subject only to the retention polices of the wireless carriers, which currently maintain records for up to five years. Critically, because location information is continually logged for all of the 400 million devices in the United States — not just those belonging to persons who might happen to come under investigation — this newfound tracking capacity runs against everyone.
[...]
The Government and JUSTICE KENNEDY contend, however, that the collection of CSLI should be permitted because the data is less precise than GPS information. [...] The location records [...] placed [Carpenter] within a wedge-shaped sector ranging from one-eighth to four square miles.
[...]
While the records in this case reflect the state of technology at the start of the decade, the accuracy of CSLI is rapidly approaching GPS-level precision. As the number of cell sites has proliferated, the geographic area covered by each cell sector has shrunk, particularly in urban areas. In addition, with new technology measuring the time and angle of signals hitting their towers, wireless carriers already have the capability to pinpoint a phone’s location within 50 meters.
The timeline feature is too valuable to me IMO. I can see my entire history spanning back a decade, including where I traveled on vacation in other countries. I don't see the value in deleting that information, no one cares beyond maybe some advertisers and I don't really care if they know my location.
"I don't really care if they know my location" is the same as "I don't really care about privacy, I have nothing to hide". The problem with this argument is that this information is being fed into systems such as PRISM and XKEYSCORE, being used to build behavioral profiles of millions of individuals, and then weaponized in order to sell you products and manipulate your political opinions. This is not a conspiracy theory anymore and a great reason to care about privacy.
I am not saying there aren't good reasons to want that privacy, but as long as I can opt-out (which I can), I have no issue with the trade-offs, they benefit me more than they cost me.
This is in stark contrast to someone people who demand universal and mandatory privacy at all costs for everyone, regardless of that.
Detailed location history for personal reference is one of the conveniences that I miss since having minimized my usage of Google products. Any recommendations of alternative solutions?
You'll probably have to tweak the reporting frequency/accuracy in the app, but I've had good results with both Android and iOS on the official apps. Of course the data won't be as detailed as Google's in terms of exact locations (like restaurants, gas stations, etc). That is a small price to pay for owning the data fully.
Not easy if you’re looking for where you went for lunch 3 months ago on a specific day, although you could argue against the general usefulness of knowing that at all.
I use it to quickly check when it was I've went to some random place outside the city, or which town I've passed by. If you don't have another tracker it can be nice to check roughly how long you walked/traveled (e.g. if you bike only occasionally) on a given day or in general at a specific time. I also find it fun to compare my very static 2020 data to my 2019 data for example.
Anyone knows any scripts or whatnot which would enable the download of current timeline history (with places, establishments and their addresses and all other (meta)data), and import into the alternative open source self-hosted one?
Haven't tested Google takeout for that functionality yet, but I kind of doubt it includes that data, probably just GPS coordinates. (I could be wrong, though.)
Last time I exported it included their predictions on likely forms of transport, didn't care about that data so didn't really look in to it but something is definitely included
If your phone shows up at the scene of a crime, even if you weren't the perpetrator, they use it against you. If your phone shows it wasn't anywhere near the scene of the crime, they claim it's irrelevant because you knew you were going to commit a crime and left your phone somewhere else.
If your phone is elsewhere you might not even be interesting enough to be questioned in the first place.
Unless the police have reason to suspect specific people then casting drag nets (phone location data, ALPR data, etc) and then sifting through the list of people they get for the most probable suspects is SOP.
The distinction only matters if it has practical effect.
Having no data causes you to be uninteresting and they leave you alone. Having data that says your phone wasn't there causes you to be uninteresting and they leave you alone. It's the same result.
It's only when your phone is informing on you that you get into trouble, because then when you're unlucky to have been in the vicinity of a crime, you then become interesting and have a bad time even when you're completely innocent.
Exculpatory data doesn't go far in the US, and why on earth would we want to encourage a system based on "Keep your location tracking on so the police can NOT prosecute you for crimes".
This applies to any private information - the less a third party has of your data, the smaller the attack surface through which incompetence, malice, and coincidence can burn you.
We deserve privacy because data bout you can be used against you by malevolent actors, whether government or non-government. It's not about whether you have done something wrong or not. The data about you can be used against you.
It creates a liability, in the sense of associated risks of holding a large liquid portable store of wealth. You might find the storage location burgled, yourself kidnapped, associates (family, household or business help, etc.) betraying you, etc. The overall consequence of those risks is not necessarily the same as the value of the asset, and could well greatly exceed it.
When everyone around you is trying to get your gold, then for all practical purposes it is still a liability. If you can convert that gold into a different asset that is just as valuable but fewer people are trying to get a hold of it, then you maintain your assets without the liability.
Let's be clear. Something can both be an asset AND a liability. These are not mutually exclusive.
Something can both be an asset AND a liability. These are not mutually exclusive.
That's precisely my argument, as I've expanded elsehwere in this thread.
What (gold|data) (is|are) an (asset|liability) is not, however, is offsetting assets/liabilities in the double-entry bookkeeping sense, as some here seem to think / be arguing (especially: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28268433 ... my correction follows).
Your usage is that gold possession becomes part of ones threat model, and is thus a liability. That's an actuarial, not an accounting, concept.
That's not the sense in which I find "data are a liability" to be useful.
Double-entry bookkeeping records transactions as debits and credits to different entities.
"Data are a liability* is a recognition that whilst there may be a positive value to data, there is also a probabalistic negative value, especially in the event of unauthorised access or disclosure. That's not a double-entry value, where debits equal credits, it's an independent value, independent of the asset value, dependent on the nature of the data, the type of disclosure, the subject of the data, and the identity of the actor(s) who gain access to the information.
The role is the same as that of any other business liability risk. And again, is independent of the asset value.
As with other liabilities, the actual extent and probability of the liability-based cost is often unclear, and may change with time, particularly as the environment changes.
Banks record deposits as liabilities because they're owed to someone. Law enforcement with sufficient pretense to get a judge to sign a warrant is owed any data Google holds. Data is a liability.
Whilst true, that's not how "data are a liability" uses the terms.
In banking or brokerages, loans and credit extended are assets as they're value owed to the bank by others. Deposits, held certificates (e.g., stocks), or stored valuables (gold in a safety deposit box) are liabilities because others can make claims on them.
Checking accounts are literally "demand deposits" in the sense that the funds are demandable at any time by the accountholder. Many savings accounts actually have limits on the amount or rate of withdrawal. These are typically large and generous, but they may exist.
To be horrendously pedantic, from the Oxford English Dictionary:
> Data
> ...
> 2. As a mass noun.
> a. Related items of (chiefly numerical) information considered collectively, typically obtained by scientific work and used for reference, analysis, or calculation. Cf. datum (n. 1a.)
Their citation of “Data is most often used as a singular mass noun in everyday usage” points to New Oxford Dictionary of English, 1999, so it’s not super recent shift.
You're being horribly pedantic by undermining your own point?
The definition you quote indicates that data has become a mass noun, i.e., non-countable. The reference to the word datum is to contrast this with part of the previous definition.
Google's practice of keeping mountains of personal data on their servers where it can be misused by anyone who can issue a subpoena needs to end.
>Innocent man, 23, sues Arizona police for $1.5million after being arrested for murder and jailed for six days when Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene of the 2018 crime
He sued for $1.5 million for being jailed for a week?
That seems completely unreasonable. The police operates on imperfect evidence, and as long as we don't switch to an omniscient surveillance state, that will always be the case. Catching the wrong guy and letting him go after a week seems like a reasonable mistake when you're looking for a murderer. If it had been 6 months, he would have had way more of a point.
> He sued for $1.5 million for being jailed for a week?
> That seems completely unreasonable.
Here's [0] another article.
He showed up in the location (Google) and his ownership of same make/color vehicle (surveillance video) added to his suspectibility. So he was arrested. A week later he was released. A year later he's suing for defamation, gross negligence, and intentional infliction of emotional distress.
In that one week:
> the arrest causes him to fail background checks
> news coverage prominently features in Google searches of his name
> forced to drop out of school, having missing too many classes of the accelerated college program he was enrolled in
So, he lost his job and his school. In one week he easily could have missed rent -- and this is before the pandemic so there's no moratorium on evictions.
$1.5 million definitely isn't unreasonable for problems caused from being in jail for a week despite innocence.
If you make $150K/year, that's still ten years of pay. We can discuss how much of a multiplier is reasonable for being punitive, but it seems rather obvious that a week in jail does not reasonably cost you ten years of Silicon Valley senior engineering wages.
For anyone who is not blessed as a programmer and merely earns the average (median) of $36,0000 year, we'd be talking about 40+ years of lost wages.
Yes, governments should be incentivised to not arrest people who are innocent. Go try to reform your local judicial system so that innocent people aren't arrested.
Can you imagine being wrongly imprisoned for a week and wondering if you'll ever get out? Living with the fear of something happening to you in an unknown and potentially unsafe environment? What about his reputation that might be permanently stained to his family members, friends, employers, the cops?
I'd also try to get the most out of this awful week.
Wow. There are about 14k to 19k homicides per year in the US. I think there should be at least 1 geofence warrant per homicide. I can't imagine anyone would find that controversial, to just see what devices were in the vicinity of a homicide around the time it happened. But it per these numbers, investigators are dropping the ball on at least thousands of homicide investigations.
There's been a recent uptick in murder (not crime) [0] rates in the US, which can skew the numbers, depending on how you choose to source your per-year stat.
However, the US does tend to drop the ball on homicides [1], with some of the lowest clearance rates in the Western world. Though that's skewed by some states being utterly atrocious, and some being more average.
> Across the country, North Dakota has the highest solved-murder rate among U.S. states for homicides reported from 1976 to 2019. It also has the fewest reported murders, according to the Murder Accountability Project. Its 94 percent solved rate dwarfs New York state’s 55 percent solved rate.
Being a spy is only getting harder. I remember reading a few years back how biometric scanning meant the CIA spy could not enter CountryX as a Textiles importer one week and a Olive salesman the next. They had to bribe people at the passport office into fixing their biometrics etc.
Now this sort of thing must make it almost impossible. You can't even leave your mobile at home accidentally - that would trip alarm bells, especially if your contact does it at the same lunch hour.
Spying seems to be a necessary part of how States understand one another. If human level intelligence work simply gets blown apart by technology then yeah we can keep track on what the other side is doing, but so very often we want to know why.
What the consequences of an ever-tighter control over identity to the intelligence community will likely be interesting, and it's already presenting problems.
Among possibilities:
- Individuals not closely associated with the IC will be increasingly utilised (knowingly or not) for intelligence work.
- Intel collection will shift from human intelligence to technical / signals intelligence (humint vs. sigint). This creates its own knock-on effects.
- Active development of countermeasures and practices, including creating and deploying cultivated identities and personas online, possibly with cooperation by online services, possibly through manipulation of them.
In an instance I'm vaguely familiar with, early in the War on Terrorism, US intelligence agencies, which rely very heavily on signals-based intelligence, especially the ability to intercept cables (including encrypted ones, thanks to a backdoor in Crypt AG's devices), telephone and satellite communications, radio/broadcast, and digital / computer communications ... were apparently stymied in trying to gather intelligence on Al Qaeda as that adversary avoided use of modern communications, relying strongly on personal messengers and physical media. Humint capabilities of penetrating cells or converting individuals were said to be underdeveloped.
Effectively, the NSA had excellent vision where Al Qaeda did not exist, and was blind where they did.
The quantity and low cost of sigint can often lead to a deprecation of humint. It's not sexy, it's slow, it's low-volume, it's expensive, it doesn't generate large support contracts with government suppliers.
But it can put precisely the right eyes and ears in precisely the right place in ways sigint often has difficulty in achieving.
Mind: this is based on open-sources discussion at the time. How much this reflected actuality vs. speculation or public campaigning / turf wars between intelligence camps (CIA tends to be more humint, NSA more sigint AFAIU) I'm not sure.
This is a much more recent article (I'm referring mostly to the 2000--2005 period), but makes similar points:
You've seen this right? https://www.wired.com/2007/06/st-cia/ There was a more detailed presentation about it from Defcon or somewhere, and one of the details that apparently gave them away was that the cellphones used only communicated with each other and not with anyone outside the group, aside from the odd screw-up.
A fun thought experiment: how can one own and use two phones without the authorities being able to correlate their ownership?
It would have been hard to avoid ten years ago. Unless you use both phones very infrequently (which is of no use to most people) I think it's nearly impossible now.
But where does it sleep at night? Where does it sleep on holidays? Near you? Or do you leave it home on a table, and the motion sensors say it’s on a table?
Well, step 0 is obviously to use a device that won't blab its sensor readings to all and sundry. The only thing you should have to worry about is cell phone tower records and call/traffic logs.
Well, not being a nation-state, I'd have to content myself with a LineageOS phone with no Google Play, or maybe a PinePhone. If I were a real spy, I've no doubt my employers would have the resources to provide me with something.
Also a modern spy difficulty is people post social media photos that countries can scrape and identify. By the time a ~20 year old decides the three letter something is their career of choice, a profile, facial recognition and history is stored.
Special operations are only a small part of what the intelligence community does. Most of it is really mundane and is done by very official attaches at the embassies.
It's compiling reports on what is happening, meeting with the other countries officials about bilateral relations, meeting your own citizen to know what they are doing. A lot of it is above board. I will hasard that most of the information which end up being classified is actually acquiried legally but becomes interesting through cross-referencing or exclusivity.
I have no doubt that being a spy is harder, the biometrics on border crossing sounds legit, but I don't imagine needing to have a different phone for different cover identities is particularly onerous.
You can't even leave your mobile at home accidentally - that would trip alarm bells, especially if your contact does it at the same lunch hour.
This is straightforward to spoof. A single programmer could do it if they cared enough. It is possible to change the GPS (GNSS?) HAL to send any information you want [1].
I am dubious - not that I can't learn to alter my (android) phone so it thought it was in London when really it is in NY - but that I would not be tripped up by correlations. It would have to be a slow sensible variation, it would have to be within the correct cell - London / NY would not work - plus other dumb stuff that I simply don't know about radio propagation or being seen on a CCTV camera etc.
Nothing about spying is ever going to be simple. Especially building those vital human relationships.
> Spying seems to be a necessary part of how States understand one another.
The country under your feet does the same. Every civilization has used spies throughout history. A greedy, hungry or desperate neighbor might get ideas that threaten your security.
>You can't even leave your mobile at home accidentally - that would trip alarm bells, especially if your contact does it at the same lunch hour.
sometimes I do wonder whether if i'll be going to US to steal some faang jobs, then TSA will mark me as a terrorist/spy internally cuz I don't have smartphone?
We need a law that requires a private company to notify the user any time their data is shared with a 3rd party, regardless if it is for commercial or warrant (or any other) purpose. That would solve a lot of problems.
We also need a law to outlaw these warrants, but I doubt that will ever happen, because I can see how useful they can be to legitimate investigations.
> Google has long shied away from providing these figures, in part because geofence warrants are largely thought to be unique to Google. Law enforcement has long known that Google stores vast troves of location data on its users in a database called Sensorvault, first revealed by The New York Times in 2019.
> Sensorvault is said to have the detailed location data on “at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide,” collected from users’ phones when they use an Android device with location data switched on, or Google services like Google Maps and Google Photo, and even Google search results. In 2018, the Associated Press reported that Google could still collect users’ locations even when their location history is “paused.”
If by hundreds of millions they mean "tens of hundreds of millions", then yes.
> "with location data switched on"
People need to realize what these two things together mean. Google believes that its anonymization strategy for device location data masks user identity. This is why they use the term "devices". It depersonalizes the information they have. De-anonymizing high-accuracy location data is easy. That means they really have location records on people. They don't technically store and index by people, that's why they can keep making carefully worded plain-English (but mark my words, it is absolutely lawyer-speak) explanations that sound innocent. But de-anonymization is just a map-reduce away, and the government knows this.
They will not open up technical details of Google Location Service (GLS) until they are forced by court order, and even then, maybe never, as it will be redacted for the public. It will be redacted because its very existence represents next-generation espionage capabilities.
Read their own documentation [1]:
> On most Android devices, Google, as the network location provider, provides a location service called Google Location Services (GLS), known in Android 9 and above as Google Location Accuracy. This service aims to provide a more accurate device location and generally improve location accuracy. Most mobile phones are equipped with GPS, which uses signals from satellites to determine a device’s location – however, with Google Location Services, additional information from nearby Wi-Fi, mobile networks, and device sensors can be collected to determine your device’s location. It does this by periodically collecting location data from your device and using it in an anonymous way to improve location accuracy.
They use it in an "anonymous way". Pardon my french, but horseshit! They are sucking accelerometer and WiFi data with GPS and calling that "anonymous".
When are people going to realize the technical capabilities of Google's dystopian location tracking? The US government already has. Google has built a one-stop shop for totalitarian government's location-tracking needs.
If the government was not getting what they wanted from Google, the entire alphabet company would have been broken up a long time ago just like the phone companies were.
No. You give it to an accomplice who continues using it consistent with your typical usage patterns. That way you not only avoid a digital trail, you generate a digital alibi.
I suspect in 20 years, walking down the street without a digital radio in your pocket will arouse suspicion though.
At some point they’d probably figure out how to use the accelerometer to fingerprint your movements. Your accomplice will almost certainly have a different profile for how the phone moves when walking.
I guess you could limit accomplice activities to things like driving around.
The resolution is probably already there now. AI can do gait recognition based on video, and sensor traces from accelerometers are accurate enough to detect individual footsteps. Are they precise enough to recognize gait? I don't know. But they can easily distinguish between walking, jogging, running, and riding a bike.
This is well into "tin foil hat" territory for me personally, but I've stopped automatically putting my phone in my pocket when I go out for an errand.
I lived the first fifteen years of my life without a "phone" on me at all times, and I don't see why I need one now.
I've debated getting a cheap/tiny phone like a Unihertz Jelly Pro with a Redpocket sim card to just keep in the car for emergencies. So far I just leave my phone at home unless I'm going on a longer trip.
Yup they could turn state's witness or blackmail you. Plus they'll want a cut of the spoils if there are any. Better to establish a pattern of leaving your phone untouched at home. Assuming you're planning it ahead of time that is.
>I suspect in 20 years, walking down the street without a digital radio in your pocket will arouse suspicion though.
Reading things like this makes me think of climate change messing up infrastructure and space junk making it impossible to operate satellites is maybe for the better.
Laws have obviously failed in keeping technology at bay from concentrating power in the hands of a few. Maybe nature can help reverse this.
No, you play a game that incentivizes walking and get a little rocker cradle thing that makes it appear to the game like you're walking many hours a day, then drop your phone into that before leaving.
"We're sure he did it, he hatched 12k eggs at the same time!"
On the other hand for those of us who relax at home over the weekend, that would be entirely normal. I hope leisure without a digital tether isn't so unheard of that it becomes suspicious automatically.
I usually pick up my phone in the course of a day spent around my house. But if I don't do so on a given day--or certainly for multiple hours on a given day--that wouldn't be anything especially strange.
Since most location data is based on WiFi stations it should be possible to record that data and play it back to the phone in the comfort of wherever you are.
Possibly GPS too, though probably an order of magnitude more complex to achieve.
That can also be used in court (e.g. “Pretty odd you just happened to turn your phone off for the first time in a decade during the exact timeframe of this crime.”). Ideally, you’d “lose” your phone a few weeks to a month before the crime and then get one afterwards.
I don't know why I think so much about crime (not murder, but larceny, and safe cracking), but I do.
I have come to the conclusion that because of the proliferation of cheap tech (Mainly cameras everywhere), pulling off successful capers in exponentially harder than it was 15 years ago.
It used to be getting away is lighting up the tires, and you are gone.
Now--cops that aren't just Revenue Collecting can get a treasure trove of info just asking for cam footage.
Hell, even carrying around construction tools can arouse suspicion if pulled over.
I guess it's for the best? There is still a bit of me rooting for the clever thief.
The trail of evidence grows exponentially, but most cops are terrible art collecting the best evidence (partly because law/jurisprudence makes it difficult).
Most cops still use fax as the primary method of requesting evidence from companies that are geographically distant. Collecting video camera evidence is slow and tedious so long as the department doesn’t have a volunteer database where residents can publish their location and other metadata. Filing requests digitally is still infrequent and usually done on portals specifically designed by tech companies to automate the tech company’s side.
The moment there is a single portal which links lots of data which automated the police side of the legwork for all systems which support automation, that is when police start to actually collect a significant portion of the exponential data being collected.
In less than 2 decades regulations supported by car makers, insurance corporations and the government themselves will outlaw cars not fitted with such systems.
Little known, the airbags already have the last 15s of driving before accidents. They act as a recording box. This was setup pretendedly because NGOs were worried about airbags triggering at the wrong time, so they have to save the last 15s of the CAN bus (brakes, speed, radio usage, wheel position, turn indicators, faults…).
Wouldn’t the second phone put you at the scene of the crime?
As an aside, working for an automotive manufacturer (my opinions are my own and doing reflect my employer, etc) I think were rapidly approaching a time when all new vehicles will have a built-in cellular connection.
The second phone would, but if you're smart you would cycle through burners, never take it home with you, never carry it with your main. Prepaid phones are cheap.
It also doesn't take much to rip onstar out of vehicles considering how many of them go from Texas to Mexico.
NHTSA keeps mandating new tech crap in cars on extremely questionable putatively utilitarian models. Infotainment systems are effectively mandatory now. The recent "infrastructure" bill also included language about investigating mandatory DUI-detection technology in new cars. Getting a vehicle without cellular is going to be impossible soon. My 2020 Tacoma (a pretty bare-bones pickup) even has a cellular modem.
I sometimes wonder if government really wants to end DUI's.
I know it sounds crazy.
I just see the amount of money marginal dui's bring into counties.
I might buy a vechicle that didn't let me drive if over .08%.
I would love to be able to drive after 10:30 pm, without a cop tailing me, looking for a marginal dui.
(In Marin County, don't drive through here after 10:30 pm. Cops gave literally nothing to do, except look for marginal dui's. There used to be a app called Trapster, but it was never implemented properly. You might get a pass on a pull over if you look wealthy though. Wealthy Ross/Kentfield guys never seem to get any "fishing" pullovers. No--I have never had a dui. I just know how these cops operate. I'm getting tired of poor people being singled out too. I mentioned my county, because I know a few of you guys live here.)
The incentives between the federal government and local police departments probably aren't aligned here, but they're probably not aligned in a lot of other places, too.
Cellular is required for the car to be able to automatically call emergency services in case of an accident. It is mandatory for new cars in Europe for a while.
I'm sure that most criminals know to either turn phones off or leave them behind, and if they don't they surely will if this kind if thing becomes more widespread. This seems like a system designed to ensnare innocents.
I would assume this LEO works in a relatively low-crime area. I know that where I am most murders remain unsolved and and the shootings that I’ve witnessed appear to be premeditated.
ah i see you have one of the new phones, as an aside, ATT decided for me to disable my phone that had no problems and sent a phone that is now never more than three bars and usually two bars, and needs recharging daily.
this phone [alcatel flip], surprisingly doesnt have the battery glued in.
in the case of battery glued in you need a nonconductive shim to jam between the contacts
Does anyone around here know if using geofence warrants increase or decrease the conviction to false conviction ratio and by how much? Have any numbers been published and studies conducted on this?
EU data is technically owned and stored by Google Ireland Limited (not Google LLC), but i'm sure Google's own legal data sifter software ensures US investigations can't pull data on locations within the EU.
It's not only location data, but also the words spoken over these devices that's available for casual perusal....a recent acquaintance mentioned working for a Google subsidiary meant signing a non-disclosure agreement that stipulated their lead sheet came from recorded user conversations. "They record everything. I literally know everything about the person I'm selling to."
The problem with that claim is that it's verifiable – you could spend time reverse engineering apps from Google and/or looking at their outgoing traffic with a proxy. And there quite a few people who do exactly that, yet no-one managed to find anything remotely like this. Do you have any other proof of this? If not I'd advise you not to blindly trust this (or any other) person.
The combination of this sort of data mining of circumstantial evidence combined with a justice system that mostly relies on the hunches of
bunch of randoms for convictions, yes I can see how potentially innocent people will end up going to jail. But I don't think the geofence warrants are ultimately at the heart of the issue.
I guess I forgot to mention I don't have Google services installed either altough that isn't any different than having background location access disabled for the Google Maps app on an iPhone.
Is there some other mechanism that Google can gather location data?
And ofcourse the government while it can't collect all that information on its own can sure as hell buy or rubber-stamp warrant their way into these datasets at will in order to side step the 4th amendment all together.
If people are generally willing to accept the axiom that information is power, I am continually baffled as to why they can't understand how reckless it is to allow all of this capture, sale and sharing of the intimate details of their lives.
How can we possibly defend ourselves or have any control over our lives while giving this much power to profit motive corporations?
This sure sounds scary, but it's just a gish gallop of scary phrases. It's a shade away from "there are microchips in the vaccines!" A bare sliver of the crimes committed online are ever even investigated (and that's crimes, not politically subversive speech). You'd think that if there was some functioning, pervasive state surveillance apparatus there would be swift punishment of the plethora of incompetent criminal schemes that people perpetrate online, but there just isn't.
> Contact tracing
If only that was even happening. South Korea did it, and they made people who were exposed to covid stay home and check in regularly with an app. If we'd had the sense to do that here we probably would've saved tens of thousands of lives.
It is still a highly human resource intensive process to investigate and punish crimes using that surveillance. It doesn't get used to identify who broke into your car and stole stuff out of it, because they just don't really care about that. They do care about everyone who was at the demonstrations, which affects the police directly and which threatens the role that the police have in protecting private capital. If you understand what their role and focus is then the lack of enforcement on petty crimes isn't a counterexample at all.
> They do care about everyone who was at the demonstrations, which affects the police directly and which threatens the role that the police have in protecting private capital.
Who are the regular people asserting their first amendment rights who are being hunted down? I haven't seen that. I have seen a bunch of insurrectionists having these tools used on them, and that's frankly a laudable use of these surveillance tools.
If you're using a peaceful protest as a cover for looting, honestly I enthusiastically encourage that 'they' hunt you down, because you're just a vanilla criminal at that point. That's an ideal outcome for the justice system.
It is an interesting argument, and indeed the pandemic has shown a lot of weak points in policy enforcement and government’s effectiveness, but all this could be selectively enforced upon you, and these are things that are quite easier to enable than to disable, so I think that prudency is warranted.
In bavaria the police abused contact-tracing guest books (a paper process!) for criminal investigations. Even well-intentioned surveillance can be turned against citizens.
> If we'd had the sense to do that here we probably would've saved tens of thousands of lives.
Hundreds of thousands. The US is currently at >628,000 COVID deaths. US citizens traveling abroad, or people traveling inside the US probably account for a significant number of COVID deaths outside of the US, but those are much harder to count.
> Sorry for the rant but the reality is that this is already a dystopian nightmare and there is no way to go back.
No need to be sorry since it's the way the world is headed now. This will soon be the norm.
I won't be surprised in 5-10 years those you mentioned will be even more expanded and current laws can't keep up. There's even recent talk of a national ID system in the US for instance which would expand it even more. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/08/voting-...
"So, for me, it all comes down to state power against the peoples' ability to meaningfully oppose that power. And I'm sitting there, uh, every day getting paid to design methods to amplify that state power. And I'm realizing that if, you know, the policy switches that are the only things that restrain these states, were changed, there... you couldn't meaningfully oppose these. I mean you would have to be the most incredibly sophisticated, technical actor in existence. I mean, I'm not sure there's anybody, no matter how gifted you are, who could oppose all of the offices and all the bright people, even all the mediocre people out there with all of their tools and all their capabilities."
These are all just tools that can just as easily be used for good as evil. You choose to look at the negative possibilities while ignoring the positive ones. As an example, if we're all tracked and recorded in public that will pretty much end non-domestic crime. Or at least guarantee that anyone that commits a crime will be caught and punished.
AFAICT there's little to no evidence to tie advancing technology to authoritarianism or otherwise diminished civil liberties.
Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and any number of others through out history have created repressive regimes without modern technology. And in the West we are a freer and more just society than we ever have been.
> As an example, if we're all tracked and recorded in public that will pretty much end non-domestic crime. Or at least guarantee that anyone that commits a crime will be caught and punished.
Where's the evidence for this? As pointed out above, we're already being tracked, and it doesn't seem to have stopped all crime, or even cut it down in a noticeable way. As for being recorded in public, that hasn't even even stopped 7-11s from being robbed, let alone preventing or resolving all crime everywhere.
> AFAICT there's little to no evidence to tie advancing technology to authoritarianism or otherwise diminished civil liberties.
Do you remember how there was a time when having a scan of your naked body examined by a stranger at the airport was considered at least mildly invasive? That was just a few years ago. Now, we're used to it. That's a small example of how fast humans adapt to preserve their sense that everything is fine. The amount of surveillance we consider normal today would have seemed oppressive not long ago.
> Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot and any number of others through out history have created repressive regimes without modern technology.
It's true that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot did not use GPS tracking against their citizens, because (being dead) they didn't have the option to use it. But electronic surveillance has been the tool of every country's secret police dating back to the invention of the telephone, so I'm not sure what you mean.
>Where's the evidence for this? As pointed out above, we're already being tracked, and it doesn't seem to have stopped all crime, or even cut it down in a noticeable way. As for being recorded in public, that hasn't even even stopped 7-11s from being robbed, let alone preventing or resolving all crime everywhere.
All of the people in jail that were caught by surveillance that can't commit crimes is a good piece of evidence. Otherwise, it's hard to prove anything about crime because we can't do double blind experiments in the real world.
Either way, we are talking about theoretical perfect surveillance. Every crime would be caught on 4k HD and the criminals location tracked. Hard to imagine how you'd get away with a crime in that scenario.
>Do you remember how there was a time when having a scan of your naked body examined by a stranger at the airport was considered at least mildly invasive? That was just a few years ago. Now, we're used to it. That's a small example of how fast humans adapt to preserve their sense that everything is fine. The amount of surveillance we consider normal today would have seemed oppressive not long ago.
TSA seems perfectly happy to fondle your junk instead. So whatever we've lost there isn't due to technology. If anything technology helps because it gives us a choice between naked body examination and junk fondling.
>It's true that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot did not use GPS tracking against their citizens, because (being dead) they didn't have the option to use it. But electronic surveillance has been the tool of every country's secret police dating back to the invention of the telephone, so I'm not sure what you mean.
The point is that repression and technology are orthogonal issues. You can have brutally repressive regimes with no modern technology. And, as I said before, the trend seems to be away from repressive regimes so there's little reason to think technology contributes to their existence.
Cameras with facial and gait recognition everywhere you go
Some cities have brought these technologies under oversight. The technologies themselves aren't inherently harmful, their misuse is.
Credit cards that track your spending and movement
Totally optional
Contact tracing
What is this even doing here
Daily massive data breaches
Laws are changing to address this from both the supply and demand side.
Every modern car has built in GPS tracking that is uploaded to the dealer and stored
Self-enrolled surveillance is indeed a huge societal problem, but cars aren't on the top of the list. We are all addicted to the GPS tracker in our pocket.
Three letter agency programs to capture as much metadata and content as possible
Encryption is on the rise.
Hash bashed copyright scanning enforcement on your local devices
Not yet, and maybe not ever if we don't stand for it.
this is already a dystopian nightmare and there is no way to go back.
It's not just that you're wrong about this, what grinds my gears is fatalist comments like this that are actively selling fatalism. Don't listen to this devil on your shoulder. The reality of the future is decided by action now.
Actually it depends on the signal, whether WiFi is turned on, etc. I used to build mobile apps for luxury clubs who wanted to know which members were arriving at the club (e.g. to go ahead and start getting their golf clubs ready. First world problems, I know). The GPS data we get access to for both Google and Apple includes lat/lng plus a radius in meters that represents the accuracy of the measurement. Depending on the different factors it can be over 100m or as little as about 5m.
They had to install the app and also consent to have their location tracked by the club. They could still use the app without that stuff, obviously, and the platform actually didn’t allow club admins to see where members were at all times—just which members were entering/exiting designated areas. It was actually quite a challenge to get that kind of information to the club in a timely fashion, especially if the club was situated near a busy roadway. You wanted the geofence large enough to give the club time to prepare to receive the guest, but not so large that it gave false positives for members simply driving past the club.
An actual connection is not necessary for wifi to contribute to location accuracy. It just uses signal strength to available access points to triangulate. How folks like Google/Apple/etc. are able to get accurate location data for those access points is unknown to me.
TLDR Android & iOS Location Services will automatically contribute wifi data and correlate it with GPS. This can be audited to prove it's anonymously uploaded but it does happen.
Just curious where all the Apple CSAM defenders are when information like this comes to light. All the "I have nothing to hide people", don't understand they don't control when or how the information is used or if the information is even accurate. Your information is power given to an invisible fist, that you will need to defend yourself against.
> NBC News reported last year how one Gainesville, Fla. resident whose information was given by Google to police investigating a burglary was able to prove his innocence thanks to an app on his phone that tracked his fitness activity.
He was forced to prove his innocence because a tech company gave incorrect information as incontrovertible 'evidence'. Everyone let that sink in as your spyPhone scans all your photos looking for 'evidence'.
You don't have access to all the information they collected and they don't share it with you even if it will prove your innocence. All prosecutors want is a persecution and they don't care if they have the wrong person. Giving them information is equivalent to slowly closing the steel door of the jail cell you didn't realize you were standing in.
* Sign into your google account
* Turned on location history (google account level) - default is off
* Turn on location reporting (device level option).
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A reasonable balance I've found is to have Google delete old location history - to do that you go to Google Maps Timeline
http://www.google.com/maps/timeline
Then do automatically delete location history. This deletes after some time. So you get the benefits of history without the forever record.
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You can also see what location history has been tracked for you with Takeout. Some cool visualizers there.