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Cellphones Google Crime Government Privacy

Police Are Using Google's Location Data From 'Hundreds of Millions' of Phones (cnet.com) 125

Posted by EditorDavid from the search-results dept.
"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."
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Police Are Using Google's Location Data From 'Hundreds of Millions' of Phones More

Police Are Using Google's Location Data From 'Hundreds of Millions' of Phones

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  • Good (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward

    This is a great way to catch criminals.

    • Re: Good (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 13, 2019 @11:45PM (#58434380)

      Yes, citizen, it is.

      Now, papers, please.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by ebvwfbw ( 864834 )

        Papers? LOL, That's so 20th Century. With Google glass they already know who you are. They already have all of your information in front of them. They've already linked you to possible crimes.

        All that is left is to arrest you.

    • Maybe so but "Law and Order: Ask Google Unit" is going to be a hard show to sit through.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Even better it's a great way for a criminal to get away with a crime and leave other people harassed or even convicted based on circumstantial data. Leave your cell phone at home and you have an air tight alibi. Have none at all and you're invisible to the system. With a police state, invisible is the best sort of state to be in.

    • eh its a usefull tool but it needs used as only part of the puzzle. Aresting and holding someone just because they were in areas is not acceptable. now looking into them passively or useig this is a start to find more connections ,maybe..

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Rob Y. ( 110975 )

      Why wouldn't any self-respecting criminal (or regular citizen, for that matter) not disable Google Location History? Or do you not believe that that really keeps your location history out of this Sensorvault DB?

      • Are you joking? "Disabling" your Google location history does nothing but prevent you from seeing your own data.

        We live in a totalitarian police state. Big Brother Google is ALWAYS watching.

  • So they never delete anything? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by gweihir ( 88907 ) on Saturday April 13, 2019 @11:45PM (#58434382)

    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.

    • Isn't the current fascist government good enough?

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dknj ( 441802 )

        I was thinking how did the last fascist government abuse this data?

        -dk

        • Don't worry! (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward

          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 ethnicall

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      My friend, we live in the age of cheap storage. Nothing will ever be deleted, ever again. Instead, might I suggest never collecting the data in the first place?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by AHuxley ( 892839 )
      The cost of collect it all and keep it all is less than sorting.

  • LineageOS (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Does moving your Android phone to a Lineage build solve the tracking problems?

    • Re:LineageOS (Score:5, Informative)

      by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Sunday April 14, 2019 @02:38AM (#58434726)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by DogDude ( 805747 )
        Well, who says you need to use those applications? You can run Lineage, and then not use any data-stealing "apps" like Google*, FAcebook*, Amazon*, Uber, Lyft, etc. The whole modern world is under this insane delusion that *nobody* can survive without using the same "apps" they themselves use. I happily live my life without giving up my data to companies like that.

        • The point is that using an Android pone with a Lineage build does not solve the tracking privacy issue. Much of the problem is on the server side, irrelevant of the quality of the local cell phone. It's built into the services that a cell phone is most useful for, such as map functions, Lyft, and the next generation of E911 services.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by DogDude ( 805747 )
            I just need a phone for email, testing, and phone calls. I don't use maps or "apps". The only tracking that I have to worry about is from the cell provider (if using cell service at all).

    • Not if you install Google Apps.

  • 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

    • Yes, it's certainly a marketing gimmick.

      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...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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, Face

  • targeted ads (Score:5, Insightful)

    by religionofpeas ( 4511805 ) on Sunday April 14, 2019 @12:42AM (#58434512)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gweihir ( 88907 )

      Ads are basically a scam. They tell the customers that effectiveness of an ad is determined by time wasted. That is obviously not true, but made the whole business rich and a massive negative factor for anybody else.

    • Re:targeted ads (Score:5, Informative)

      by JaredOfEuropa ( 526365 ) on Sunday April 14, 2019 @02:48AM (#58434752) Journal
      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"

      • I suspect that Google doesn't really care too much about accuracy, as long as they can convice the advertisers that the ads are targeted.

        I've noticed that their recommended links from the home screen align much better with my interests than the ads I see, so they do have the data.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      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.

      Perhaps you should check your settings. Google has ad options, one of which is "non personalized ads" where they will show you only generic ads. You can set it to show the ads Google thinks are most relevant to you instead.

      I set mine to be generic to keep down the creepy factor of having my searches show up in the ads.

    • 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).

    • "Advertising" is just a distraction, a convenient excuse for snooping. More and more people are realizing that Big Brother Google and Faceboot make all their money from selling surveillance data to Uncle Sam and other repressive governments.

  • 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.

  • It's worse (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Shut up, The Kardashians are on!

  • And people wonder why I still use a "dumb" phone. My cellular provider may know where I am, but Google doesn't.

  • Is the data reliable? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AxeTheMax ( 1163705 ) on Sunday April 14, 2019 @02:51AM (#58434762)
    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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by kinko ( 82040 )

      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.

      when I moved countries (but took my wireless router with me), google used to think I was still at my old location for the first several months (when I was connected my to wifi). I guess until the next time a google car drove past and got the new location of the AP mac address...

    • It would be admissible in court. I reckon that bad data would be hard to argue against.

  • Walled garden in one ecosystem, pervasive spying in the other. Hmm...

  • It's not anonymous (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Google claims our location data is anonymous, but it's not anonymous if it can be looked up.

  • the simple reason that phones/tablets need a physical power off switch which actually disconnects the battery AMEN
  • As Bart Simpson says "It never hurts to have an extra set of fingerprints on your knife." Or something like that.

  • (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.

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