I traded privacy for convenience. I almost went to jail.
Editor’s note: This article comes from WeChat public account “qubit” (ID: QbitAI) , author: Guo Yipu.
Google, which dominates the global Internet community, has been embroiled in an unjust, false, and wrong case because of its “dominance”.
An ordinary cycling enthusiast suddenly turned into a suspect, suffered injustice, and spent a lot of money seeking a lawyer to prove his innocence.
All of this, just because Google ’s geolocation service shows that he has passed by the scene of a theft case many times.
And Google gave this information to the police.
Inexplicably becoming a suspect
Zachary McCoy, a 30-year-old man living in Gainesville, Florida, works in the catering industry and loves cycling.
△ Picture from NBC
His life was ordinary, until January 2020, when he was about to go to work in a restaurant, he received an email.
This email is inexplicable, but it is enough to deter him. The content of the message is:
He, Zachary McCoy, has been involved in a crime and the police have followed him.
The sender is Google ’s legal investigation support team.
Google told McCoy in the email that the police asked Google to provide information about McCoy ’s Google account, so Google sent him an email and told him that if McCoy could not be blocked by law within 7 days, He will give his account information to the police.
This 30-year-old man is scared.
He is just an ordinary Google user, using Google ’s Android phone, logging in to Google ’s Gmail, brushing Google ’s tubing videos, and using hundreds of millions of Chinese people to use Tencent ’s QQ WeChat signal, using Ali account to Taobao and Alipay Similarly, these accounts are inseparable, and these accounts store a large amount of information about themselves.
The thought of Google ’s account linked to his own life, McCoy was afraid he would be wronged, “I feel veryFear, I do n’t know what ’s going on. Maybe the police want what they get from me, and they do n’t know what crime they will be charged with. “
The road to self-help
However, Google only gave him 7 days.
In order to prevent himself from being thrown into prison inexplicably, McCoy must act.
Start with the email from Google itself.
Fortunately, in addition to the warning account information to be disclosed to the police, this email also wrote his “case involved” number.
With this number, McCoy found a case on the website of the local police station.
It turned out that in March 2019, an old lady had her house stolen.
The old lady is 97 years old and lives close to McCoy’s house, less than a mile (1.6 kilometers) away. The items stolen were several pieces of jewelry, including an old lady’s more than $ 2,000 engagement ring.
Understanding what the case is, McCoy has to find a lawyer. The lawyer was still expensive. He had to go to his parents and ask for some money to pay for his lawyer’s fees. He hired a lawyer Caleb Kenyon.
“Criminal evidence” comes from Google
This lawyer is not ordinary. He is a Ph.D. at the University of Florida’s Levin School of Law and has handled complex cases such as medical fraud and murder.
He found that Google originally had a tool called “geofence warrant” that could cooperate with police monitoring to obtain Google positioning data of all people near the crime scene. As long as users turned on GPS, Bluetooth, and wifi, they The geographical location information of can be obtained by the police, and it can be accurate to several hours and several kilometers, and anyone passing by can be detected.
△ Picture from MPR News
This “geographic information authorization” is already available to police across the United States.
According to Google, U.S. states and U.S. federal law enforcement agencies are increasingly relying on the tool.In 2018, police requested the tool 15 times more than the previous year, and it increased in 2019. Five times, many policemen praised this tool. With this tool, they detected many cases of killings, shootings, robberies, abductions, sexual assaults and put prisoners in prison.
Furthermore, the “Geographic Information Authorization” tool is a secret tool, and the suspects and defense lawyers who were sent to the dock were unaware of its existence.
But the capable Kenyon lawyer discovered this. After working with McCoy, he discovered the cause of the grievance.
The origin of the fallacy
It turned out that McCoy was included in the “suspects” process:
The old lady found that something was missing. After reporting the case, the local police sought a search warrant from the county court in order to find a clue.
With the search warrant, the police asked Google to keep a record of active devices near the old lady’s house. It’s as if your phone is always on WeChat, and the American people ’s Android phone is always on Google services, so as long as you ask Google for data, you know who is active near the old lady’s house.
In the location record of McCoy ’s mobile phone, on the day of the crime, he passed the old lady’s house three times within an hour.
McCoy loves to ride, so he installed a software called RunKeeper on his mobile phone. Just like WeChat Sports, this software can obtain geographic information and record his riding activities.
However, this software will also transmit his sports information to Google, so although McCoy only walks near his home, but it happens to be closely integrated with the coordinates of the old lady’s home, the police will have to doubt him .
The police initially looked at the records of some devices and found that McCoy’s mobile phone was particularly suspicious, and he was particularly active near the old lady’s house.
Of course, Google ’s data only contains the mobile phone ’s activity record, without the owner ’s name, so after locking the suspect, the police went to Google to ask for information about the owner of the phone.
That’s the first email.
Prove innocence
Finally, after understanding all this, Kenyon LawThe division called the police and told them they had found the wrong person.
Later, the lawyer found the county court that originally approved the police search warrant and demanded that the search warrant be invalidated, preventing Google from disclosing McCoy’s account information to the police.
Attorney Kenyon also showed the police the data of McCoy RunKeeper to prove that McCoy was innocent.
In the end, the search warrant was withdrawn and McCoy was innocent and no longer regarded by the police as a suspect.
The tyranny of technology
Even though McCoy was not arrested by the police and lawyer Kenyon closed the case, they still felt that there was something wrong with the matter.
Attorney Kenyon believes that this search warrant is unconstitutional, because with this search warrant, the police can search the data of countless people in order to find a suspect.
But the normal operation should be that the police lock a suspect and then apply for a search warrant to investigate this suspect.
And Google ’s “Geographic Information Authorization” feature treats countless innocent people as suspicious. In the eyes of Kenyon, it is almost “the act of the fascist government in the movie.”
Attorney Kenyon said there is a bigger dispute behind the McCoy incident.
Just as in a case in Arizona in 2018, a man was treated as a murderer and sentenced to prison. The key evidence for his murder was Google ’s “geographic information authorization”.
For McCoy, if his parents hadn’t given him thousands of dollars to hire a lawyer, he would have expected to experience the same fate as this Arizona man.
He always feels that he spent thousands of dollars to prove that he didn’t steal something, and that the money was spent unreasonably.
Some people have commented that this is a bug in the US judicial system. When a person is mistaken for a suspect, he must pay for his lawyer to prove his innocence, but the wrong policeman does not have to pay for it himself. Lawyers sued, this is not equal.
Also, I’ve been busy for almost a year, and the thief who stole the old lady’s jewelry has not been caught.
Technology can sometimes play a key role, but sometimes it is also creating “false positives” and creating trouble for one “McCoy” after another.
In addition, the application of technology and information, what can be shared with law enforcement agencies, and what can’t cooperate are always controversial.
For example, is Google’s “geographic information authorization” shared with law enforcement authorities? Earlier, Apple had a well-known case of resisting pressure and not unlocking the suspect’s iPhone for the FBI …
Perhaps in this case of Google, there was a transfer of “privacy for convenience” in the user regulations.
But who would have thought that “privacy transfer” would be a disaster of no ill will?
Reference link: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike-ride-past-burglarized-home-made-him-n1151761https://www.mprnews. org / story / 2019/02/07 / google-location-police-search-warrants https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22511637