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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."
Did you miss the part where the wrong guy was arrested?
I think not. Much of the stored data is on the server side, for applications like "google Maps" and "Uber" and "Lyft" and "Weather" that have legitimate reasons to know where you are. Your cell phone's identifying information, such as its connection in the cell phone data networks, its GPS, and the detected nearby wifi access points is part of how it determines the current location, and all of that can be stored on the server side, associated with any unique characteristics of your phone. Even if the attributes are not unique, such as MAC address from cheap NIC cheapsets, the data can be correlated with other data from nearby or from the same time period to help identify a target.
I am curious how the data is stored, and what it is optimized to provide answers for. Individual device tracking, and a record of all other MAC addresses seen during their use, is certainly a desirable goal for intelligence agencies.
Targeted ads are not about sending specific ads to interested individuals (even though they try and sell them to us as such, with words like "improved experience" and "more relevant"). Data like this is merely used to place a bunch of demographic tags on us: age, interests, income, job, political leaning, sexual orientation etc. Advertisers then target specific demographic groups that might be interested in their products. If your product appeals to republican lesbians who haven't had a haircut in the last 4 weeks, then you can target them, pay for 1,000 impressions rather than 10,000,000, and still be likely to hit the 2 prospects who are actually interested in your stuff. The odds that you are one of those 2 are decidedly poor in both cases, that's why the ads don't seem any more relevant to you even though they are "targeted"
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...