by Chris Black
Back in the day, cops had to put physical “bugs” (recording devices) in criminals’ houses and cars.
Now, they just use your phone, especially if you’re on Android.
No worries, even if you’re using Apple, you probably have apps installed that can be used to listen to you and track you.
At one point, in one of the WikiLeaks dumps, it was revealed that cops were using Angry Birds to invade people’s privacy.
So, there’s no privacy, regardless of what you’re using.
JUST IN: A federal judge has upheld DOJ’s expansive “geofence” warrant that allowed prosecutors to use Google location data to identify people who entered the Capitol on Jan. 6. The 78-page opinion is worth a read. t.co/sVpT1bmmq7 pic.twitter.com/w2YVHJm0eB
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) January 25, 2023
With all things considered, check this out: whenever you read “no suspects were arrested,” what they are telling you is “the police decided they did not want to arrest the perpetrator.”
In January 2020, Florida resident Zachary McCoy received a concerning email from Google: local authorities were asking the company for his personal information and he had just seven days to stop them from handing it over.
Police were investigating a burglary, McCoy later found out, and had issued Google what’s called a geofence warrant. The court-ordered warrant requested the company look for and hand over information on all the devices that were within the vicinity of the broken-into home at the time of the alleged crime. McCoy was on one of his regular bike rides around the neighbourhood at the time and the data Google handed over to police placed him near the scene of the burglary.
Not very many people know or care about this policy of Apple.
Here’s the part from The Guardian about iPhone:
Now, Apple has taken steps to publish its own numbers, revealing that in the first half of 2022 the company fielded a total of 13 geofence warrants and complied with none. The difference? According to Apple’s transparency report, the company doesn’t have any data to provide in response. An Apple spokesperson did not go into detail about how the company avoids collecting or storing time-stamped location data in such a way that prevents compliance with geofence warrants, but reiterated the company’s privacy principles which includes data minimization and giving users control of their data.
While Apple’s most recent record on responding to government requests for data also includes complying with 90% of US government requests for account information, experts say the newly published numbers on geofence warrants highlight a clear lesson: “If you don’t collect [the data] you can’t give it to the government or have it breached by hackers,” Andrew Crocker, the Surveillance Litigation Director at EFF, said to the Guardian.