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Police Are Using Google's Location Data From 'Hundreds of Millions' of Phones (cnet.com)
"When law enforcement investigations get cold, there's a source authorities can turn to for location data that could produce new leads: Google."
An anonymous reader quotes CNET: Police have used information from the search giant's Sensorvault database to aid in criminal cases across the country, according to a report Saturday by The New York Times. The database has detailed location records from hundreds of millions of phones around the world, the report said. It's meant to collect information on the users of Google's products so the company can better target them with ads, and see how effective those ads are. But police have been tapping into the database to help find missing pieces in investigations.
Law enforcement can get "geofence" warrants seeking location data. Those kinds of requests have spiked in the last six months, and the company has received as many as 180 requests in one week, according to the report.... For geofence warrants, police carve out a specific area and time period, and Google can gather information from Sensorvault about the devices that were present during that window, according to the report. The information is anonymous, but police can analyze it and narrow it down to a few devices they think might be relevant to the investigation. Then Google reveals those users' names and other data, according to the Times...
[T]he AP reported last year that Google tracked people's location even after they'd turned off location-sharing on their phones.
Google's data dates back "nearly a decade," the Times reports -- though in a statement, Google's director of law enforcement and information security insisted "We vigorously protect the privacy of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement." (The Times also interviewed a man who was arrested and jailed for a week last year based partly on Google's data -- before eventually being released after the police found a more likely suspect.)
"According to the Times, Google is the primary company that appears to be fulfilling the warrants," reports Gizmodo, adding that Apple "says it can't provide this information to authorities..."
"A thriving black market in location data has persisted despite promises from carriers to stop selling it to middlemen, who divert it from intended uses in marketing and other services."
An anonymous reader quotes CNET: Police have used information from the search giant's Sensorvault database to aid in criminal cases across the country, according to a report Saturday by The New York Times. The database has detailed location records from hundreds of millions of phones around the world, the report said. It's meant to collect information on the users of Google's products so the company can better target them with ads, and see how effective those ads are. But police have been tapping into the database to help find missing pieces in investigations.
Law enforcement can get "geofence" warrants seeking location data. Those kinds of requests have spiked in the last six months, and the company has received as many as 180 requests in one week, according to the report.... For geofence warrants, police carve out a specific area and time period, and Google can gather information from Sensorvault about the devices that were present during that window, according to the report. The information is anonymous, but police can analyze it and narrow it down to a few devices they think might be relevant to the investigation. Then Google reveals those users' names and other data, according to the Times...
[T]he AP reported last year that Google tracked people's location even after they'd turned off location-sharing on their phones.
Google's data dates back "nearly a decade," the Times reports -- though in a statement, Google's director of law enforcement and information security insisted "We vigorously protect the privacy of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement." (The Times also interviewed a man who was arrested and jailed for a week last year based partly on Google's data -- before eventually being released after the police found a more likely suspect.)
"According to the Times, Google is the primary company that appears to be fulfilling the warrants," reports Gizmodo, adding that Apple "says it can't provide this information to authorities..."
"A thriving black market in location data has persisted despite promises from carriers to stop selling it to middlemen, who divert it from intended uses in marketing and other services."
This is a great way to catch criminals.
Iâ(TM)m gonna kick his bitch ass.
Will make it a lot easier for the next fascist government to identify all those that were at the "wrong" events or ever physically close to the "wrong" people, even decades later.
This data should be deleted after at most a year.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Take advantage of the precious few years we have left where your always-on general purpose tracking and surveillance device is still optional and non-implanted to leave it at home whenever you go out to shoot people or whatever.
Or at the very least use iShit, but only as long as you live in a country where Apple considers it more profitable (and where corporations are powerful and unregulated enough) to make a big public show about fighting government surveillance rather than a country where they instead capitulate to it totally.
We need laws saying such things can only be used when the crime is homicide or something heinous. Where the crime involves violence where typical offenders get a sentence of not less than 15 years.
Also, access to the data must be granted on a specific case by case basis and judges making such approvals rotated out every year or 5 request approvals, whichever is first.
Police have used information from the search giant's Sensorvault database to aid in criminal cases across the country, according to a report Saturday by The New York Times. The database has detailed location records from hundreds of millions of phones around the world, the report said. It's meant to collect information on the users of Google's products so the company can better target them with ads, and see how effective those ads are. But police have been tapping into the database to help find missing pieces in investigations.
Batman would be proud.
Does moving your Android phone to a Lineage build solve the tracking problems?
I hate what we've built. I've never used Facebook, Twitter, or a smartphone. Google never respected the U.S. So many of their employees did not grow up w/ American values. After 20 years, Google has only added bars to our prison. I'm done w/ Google.
Left or Right? Democrat or Republican? C++ or Fortran? Pro or Anti Apple? We are polarized in so many ways. Let's not let our bias work against our vested interests however. Where privacy matters there is only one company that provides hardware that stands out.
Yes, it's certainly a marketing gimmick. Apple was slow to capitalize on the advertising / sale of customer info bandwagon. Now, to cover that error before shareholders, they present that as a 'feature'. "See," they will tell investors, "we've locked in customer loyalty by not selling them out!"
It's a fragile benefit to Apple buyers. For now they can trust that Apple will protect their privacy rather diligently. But corporate winds change like the tide and the future may not be so kind to Apple consumers.
...omphaloskepsis often...
This time around Anne Frank's diary will be on a remote wipeable smartphone, and it won't take them years to find them hiding in a attic or cellar, it will just take a check of facebook posts and friends webs to track down and purge the undesirable cultural, relgious, sexual, or ethnic groups we need demonized for the temporary stability of our regime. Of course the addition this time, is that we can take DNA samples from everyone and sequence them so even the most tenuous member of a group can be ethnically purged, and only our purest brethren saved and allowed into leadership positions in the party.
You think I am kidding? Just watch.
It's meant to collect information on the users of Google's products so the company can better target them with ads
After all those billions spent, I am still waiting for my first relevant ad. I either see ads for products I have no interest in at all, or ads for products I have already looked at.
Like drugs being legal until made illegal, technology can be used to incriminate previously as yet proven guilty partys. Now, the bigger fish swim away while law enforcement shoot the smaller fish as if they were in a receptacle assembled by coopers.
See the latest unsealed indictment, in particular the two way traffic between Donald Trump Junior and Russian intelligence Guccifer 2.0.... It seems Barr is hiding multiple felonies. Not just receiving information from the hack, Trump Jr, requesting information, distributing stolen passwords and more. These are all straight felonies.
You have Barr, who'se covering up felonies, you have Mitch McConnell who won't let Republican controlled Senate vote on anything Trump would veto, effectively making the Republican(!) Senate Trump's bitch, so Fascists state is already here. All of that private data is already accessible to an unindicted co-conspirator, and so all accessible to team Putin, and the mechanisms of prosecution are blocked by just two bad actors.
https://www.justice.gov/file/1080281/download
We get the usual statist LIE from slashdot that phone networks have to be 'requested' for phone location data.
In reality, every major phone network provides real time direct access to location data for the intelligence agencies of host nations.
Here's a fact. Years ago, US TV shows commonly had dramas where viewers were made aware that the US government had access to phone location data for ALL phones. Then the NSA gave the major networks new guidelines. Overnite the dramas changed. Now only phones with GPS could be tracked, and then only if the phone was used to make/receive a call. A complete and total lie- a lie repeated by sites like Slashdot.
Low brained politicians always fret about anything informing potential 'criminals', and these dribblers become the excuse mechanism used by their Deep State masters. Low brained politicians (the sh-t that appears daily on US TV) don't believe in Fredom of Speech, Conscience or assembly, cos they are low b-etas, and thus think the sheeple they represent would 'abuse' such freedoms. The evil alphas high above them exploit this low b-eta psychology.
The braindead dribblers who still think this site 'good' are all middle to low b-etas who likewise think freedoms are only good 'in theory'. but in practice sheeple must be protected from their natural instrincts. Hence all the filth here cheering the arrest of Assange.
Slashdot supporters applaud the Deep State total surveillance initiatives. They are the same garbage that makes up the common poster on Reddit.
Of course, the nature of B-etas causes periods of relative societal decency to come to a vilent crashing end. B-etas always cheer the rise of evil alphas- the very reason Plato's Republic decries 'democracy' as a terrible system. 'People power' ALWAYS equals evil alpha power in the end, as the West is now discovering to Humanity's cost.
There is a large section of society disgusted by the opinions of the average Slashdot/Reddit scumbag, but that section of society has too large a proportion of powerless people. The authoritarian warmongering average person here will have their way, and Clinton/Blair's desire to see the West use nuclear warheads with the same readiness as the West used depleted uranium will become reality very soon. The police state beloved by Slashdot is designed to help the world lurch into the next World War.
The supreme court was right.. Cell phones are more intrusive than an ankle bracelet..
https://www.npr.org/2018/06/22/605007387/supreme-court-rules-police-need-warrant-to-get-location-information-from-cell-to
1) If you are going to commit a crime. leave your phone at home. Are there apps that can call other people at pre-scheduled times? Sounds like an alibi to me.
2) Don't livestream your crime to bookface, or your piles of money, drugs, or weapons.
3) Give a bum some money, have them buy you a couple non-sequential serial burner phones.
I'm betting Trump will tell Assange "he has friends in high places", and dangle a pardon as means to getting him to shut up about the Donald Trump junior discussion.
And Konstantine Kilimink, because he knew about the Trump Tower Moscow deal, and kept it secret as Trump was lying about it to his Fox and Friends followers.
And the other Russian GRU staffers who did the hack, because they did the grunt work needed. If you see the new indictments being unsealed as Barr tries to hide the evidence, all of that was know to Devin Nunes, the Republican head of the Intelligence committee, to the other Trump supporters and to Rand Paul prior to his visit to Moscow. They knew how deep it was, and went to Russia to cut cooperation deals knowing Russia had undermined the election.
Russia helped Trump, it can help Rand Paul become President or Devin Nunes become President or William Barr become President....
My friend, if Google are being forces to handover this information, there is zero chance Apple is not.
It matters little as this location information is gathered by the telcos anyway.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_phone_tracking
All the companies that collect this data have vulnerable storage of the raw data. If the NSA is willing to spend the money to analyze, they can harvest the raw, ananonymized data by tapping the exposed load balancers or copying the logs from the hosts in AWS or elsewhere. And so can every other nation's security experts and moles, by getting employees inside those companies to steal encryption keys or access keys. It's just not that well secured.
I simply don't understand how this behavior can be tolerated by anyone.
If I steal a ham from Kroger, take it home and put it in my smart fridge that senses I have added ham, will the police be able to access this data and obtain a search warrant?
Wow, sure glad I dismantled my cheap dumbphone (because I'm not stupid and don't want a so-called 'smartphone'), identified the GPS antenna, and shorted it to ground, effectively disabling any GPS functions permanently. Oh and IDGAF about cell tower triangulation that's not very accurate at all, and the phone is off when I'm not using it anyway. Enjoy getting sucked up in random police dragnets and grilled about crimes you had nothing to do with, especially if you're not white, because we're living in the most racist times since before the Civil War.
And people wonder why I still use a "dumb" phone. My cellular provider may know where I am, but Google doesn't.
Remove the batteries and only look at missed calls and listen to voice mail in fixed location you don't mind governments knowing. Like your home or work since they already know where you work and live anyway.
I look at my location history sometimes, especially after long trips. Two years ago on reviewing a trip to India it said I had been in Patna, a city I've never been within several hundred miles of. So I knew it was not dependable. I've just looked up the location history for that period in detail. It is still there. It says that I was in Domino's Pizza in Ashok Rajpath Rd, Chowk, Patna, it also says that I then travelled a distance of 1100 miles to a place in southern India where I had actually been, in 13 minutes, by car. It was probably caused by someone identifying a business address wrongly, but it is absolutely not reliable. Lawyers should question its accuracy.
WindBourne, quick blame China !!
Apple can't hand over what they don't have. Google keeps your location history and Apple might not have any data to give or it could be encrypted in a way that even Apple can't access it.
Google's not being forced. They're profiting from selling your location.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
I mean, it's a feature that makes me prefer Apple. Is it a gimmick, or do they recognize there are people willing to pay to not be tracked? Is' there qany feature taht is not a gimmick in your eyes?
And maybe Aple changes in the future, but that seems less likely. They make tons of money now, why change? Although Microsoft was makign tons of money pre-Windows 10, so...
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Walled garden in one ecosystem, pervasive spying in the other. Hmm...
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Google claims our location data is anonymous, but it's not anonymous if it can be looked up.
Which one is it? The summary seems confused between the two.
the simple reason that phones/tablets need a physical power off switch which actually disconnects the battery AMEN
What the bloodclot is a Sensorvault database? That sounds like an egregious use of their customer data
In Australia, normally the police subpoena the geo-location data of the phone company. Unless they have their own stingray like device which harvests everybodys location within tower range -even if there is only one person of interest.
I don't get your logic. You seem to be taking their marketing at face value. Apple joined PRISM in 2012. They seem to spy at least as much as any other company. The only difference is that, as with their devices, they want tight control over their product. Apple also shows no sign of any interest in moral values. They use virtual slave labor, offshore their money to avoid taxes, and deliberately design hardware to maximize sales. I wouldn't trust Apple any more than I'd trust Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook -- except in high profile cases where Tim Cook sees a chance to make Apple look like a white knight.
All empires run on slavery, and use informants to keep the slaves in line
I've been getting nonstop ads for Gundam model kits. Too lazy to build them anymore so I haven't bought anything, but I click and ogle the kits every now and then (current gen Master Grades are damn near as good as perfect grades were when I was a kid, just need to add the LEDs yourself).
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
IMHO, unlike what self-appointed SJWs & "Privacy Advocates/Watchdogs" & anti-government anarchists always try to claim/portray, general public is NOT obsessed w/ privacy (ask FB for example) & always like/happy to help law enforcement to catch criminals!!!
NSA could just alter the data so "YOU WERE THERE"
I met a German traveler the other day. He built a niche app for parking management. (Think big institutional parking lots.). He said that selling data to the gestapo is a big part of his business. Apparently Big Brother pays his collaborators well.
Fastest growing search engine, If you need to look up anything in private, without being tracked use the search engine that owns its own search results, pass it on
As Bart Simpson says "It never hurts to have an extra set of fingerprints on your knife." Or something like that.
To ensure perfect aim, shoot first and call whatever you hit the target
(The Times also interviewed a man who was arrested and jailed for a week last year based partly on Google's data -- before eventually being released after the police found a more likely suspect.)
This is why dragnets are so evil. The only thing that matters is if it can be pinned on you, not whether or not you were guilty.
"Someone needs to talk to the tree of liberty about its ghoulish drinking problem." by ohnocitizen
Very boring.