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Police Use Fitbit Data To Charge 90-Year-Old Man In Stepdaughter's Killing (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The last time Anthony Aiello spoke to his stepdaughter, he took homemade pizza and biscotti to her house in San Jose, Calif., for a brief visit. Mr. Aiello, 90, told investigators that she then walked him to the door and handed him two roses in gratitude. But an unnoticed observer in the house later revealed that their encounter ended in murder, a police report said. Five days afterward, Mr. Aiello's stepdaughter, Karen Navarra, 67, was discovered by a co-worker in her house with fatal lacerations on her head and neck. She had been wearing a Fitbit fitness tracker, which investigators said showed that her heart rate had spiked significantly around 3:20 p.m. on Sept. 8 (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), when Mr. Aiello was there. Then it recorded her heart rate slowing rapidly, and stopping at 3:28 p.m., about five minutes before Mr. Aiello left the house, the report said. Mr. Aiello was arrested last week on murder charges and booked into the Santa Clara County Jail, the San Jose Police Department said. On Thursday, he will appear in court in the Hall of Justice in San Jose, according to the Santa Clara County district attorney's office. "[T]he police said their investigation used a combination of video surveillance and data from Ms. Navarra's Fitbit, an Alta HR device, which she wore on her left wrist and synchronized with a computer in her home, where she lived alone," reports NYT. When asked for comment, Fitbit shared a copy of its privacy policy, stating in part that they comply with legal processes, including search warrants and court orders, when it shares data.
Tech companies are not, will not, and cannot be your friends.
In this case it's cool if they legit caught a murderer with it because at least it actually caught someone who did something terrible instead of the feds spending hundreds of manhours to bust your local weed dealer and shoot his dog or whatever, but don't think for a minute anything you have that collects data on you can be trusted.
A cell phone is a tracking devices that happens to be able to make phone calls. Seems like fitness trackers are just that.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Tech companies are not, will not, and cannot be your friends.
A certain amount of paranoia is certainly warranted in technology any time it harvests your information, for sure.
However in this case a device that the victim owned and activated was used to obtain information on her last moments alive. The NYT article shows that the police obtained a warrant to get the data, as they should. The data then was used to construct a timeline to determine what happened, when.
While the fitbit is not marketed as a crime-fighting device, it was a useful tool in this investigation. I don't really see what the problem here is. There is no indication that the victim was wearing the fitbit against her own will.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If I ever get to be 90 I wish I could be anywhere near fit enough to kill someone. Not that I would want to but do that but if you can actually kill someone violently it means you can move properly, which a lot of 90 year olds can't.
She had been wearing a Fitbit fitness tracker, which investigators said showed that her heart rate had spiked significantly around 3:20 p.m. on Sept. 8 (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), when Mr. Aiello was there. Then it recorded her heart rate slowing rapidly, and stopping at 3:28 p.m., about five minutes before Mr. Aiello left the house, the report said.
Yeesh. I'd imagine anyone looking at that data, knowing that a murder had been committed, would get a cold shiver down their spine, watching the heartrate data do that.
That being said.. while in this case a tracking device (which is what Fitbit is, after all) has provided the time-of-death evidence necessary to catch a killer, it's still completely fucked up that people are voluntarily wearing a tracking device like Fitbit that gives away such valuable personal data to any corporation for any reason -- that apparently the police and other government agencies can then have access to. Don't do it, folks.
Take any digital watches and cell phones present next time I kill someone...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.