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- Hacker News
- Any warrant must be extremely specific and limit the scope as far as possible.
Warrants 99% of the time are rubber stamped and issued for either something non-existent or very flimsy evidence and needs to be stopped in its tracks.
by magenta4 - What if they purchase the information from a company peddling it rather than compelling cell phone companies to hand it over?by jimbob45
- That is the loop hole IMO and that's how they will get around it.by Molitor5901
- For an example of what can be done with such purchased data, one project at a previous employer was:
- identifying all cell phone #s which would regularly appear w/in a certain radius of any State Police Barracks
- disambiguating that from people who lived/worked nearby and/or who met certain criteria
- determining the income and certain other criteria of the remaining numbers
- identifying the home address of the remaining cell #s which met the final criteria and mailing a franchise offer to those cell #s with the assumption that it would be targeting State Police Troopers
by WillAdams - This data was being “compelled” from Google. If Google had told its users that their data might be sold, had sold it, and the government had acquired it that way, this case comes out differently.
In reality, Google simply stopped collecting this data in their cloud, leaving it only on the phone.
Highly recommend (as always) listening to the oral arguments in your favorite podcast player. The specific question of how Google’s T&C’s mattered here came up more than once.
by twoodfin - So surveillance tech works. That isn't a question, it is a statement. In a perfect world only bad people would have it applied to them. The issue is that it is too easy now. When wire tapping became a thing it was a physical thing that had time and effort costs. Abuse of it was capped by capability to do it and that bar made it, to me, a reasonable compromise that a judge would need to issue a warrant and that the police would need to expend real, finite, resources to execute it. Without boundaries any surveillance tech is to dangerous to have. Maybe we need quotas? You can only request and monitor x# of people a month where x is a small number related to population size. We need to find ways to limit overreach of technology capabilities. I am glad this was decided this way but I really want a more concrete tool that limits all technologies like this.by jmward01
- What is often overloked is how much location data leaks through photo metadata alone. Every photo taken with a phone contains GPS coordinates, timestamps, and device info in the EXIF data. People share photos publicly without realizing they are broadcasting their exact location history. At least with geofence warrants there is a legal process, with photo metadata it is just frely available to anyone who checks.by tosief
- Most (all?) services people use to share their images strip the metadata. You’re not going to find exif data on WhatsApp, instagram, Snapchat etcby echoangle
- PDF of the full decision: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdfby gausswho
- It's such a little thing but while reading the opinion I see that the court (Kagan in this case?) makes a factual claim it provides SOURCES.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-112_0am4.pdf
"Modern cell phones, we observed a dozen years ago, are “such a pervasive and insistent part of daily life that the proverbial visitor from Mars might conclude they were an important feature of human anatomy.” Riley v. California, 573 U. S. 373, 385 (2014). Since then, the percentage of Americans who own smartphones has only increased. To- day, more than nine in ten Americans own a smartphone. See W. Bishop, Pew Research Center, Mobile Fact Sheet (Nov. 20, 2025) (91%); compare A. Smith, Pew Research Center, Smartphone Ownership—2013 Update (June 5, 2013) (56%)."
by gandreani - Tbh it feels quite performative, giving an air of rigor to the what often feels like post hoc reasoning and selective application of precidence and case law...by tqi
- The surprising bit is that 10% of Americans DO NOT own a smartphone. That must be exceedingly difficult. Increasingly everyday activities require them, without fallbacks. I presume those numbers exclude children, and then if you account for the infirm, it wouldn't surprise me if we started to get to universal levels of ownership.by jacobr1
- Most SCOTUS opinions are rigorously sourced. They’re usually also well argued. The recent spate being an exception, in particular anything written by Alito.
- Of course Alito and Thomas would have allowed the government unlimited power. I am bit surprised to see Barret in the minority of this one.by Hnrobert42
- She's not as big on some of the broader interpretations of the 4th amendment that more civil liberty minded justices would lend credence to.by DetroitThrow
- As per the current conservative trend of allowing authoritarianism through technicality, the majority of Alito's dissent is just that the Court shouldn't rule on this at all because it won't help the defendant's case much specifically.by ocdtrekkie
- If it is reasonable to have your privacy in a public place, does this mean that products like Flock which indiscriminately violate your privacy would now require a warrant for law enforcement to access (currently they do not)?by arlattimore
- > If it is reasonable to have your privacy in a public place
I don't think it's reasonable to have privacy in a public place. All other arguments follow from there.
What do you think should be "private" when you step outside your home?
by petcat - Where does the ruling discuss public places? The article quotes the ruling as saying, “An individual has a reasonable expectation of privacy in records about his cell phone’s location.” I don’t think a ruling about private records held by a private entity like google or a phone company naturally extends to surveillance of public places.by derektank
- The implications are far reaching beyond cell phones. any service that stores location data for it's user is subject to 4th amendment expectations _regardless_ of an opt-in. The court specifically rejected the argument that by opting-in the user is abrogating their privacy rights. If you centrally store location data you have an obligation to protect that data under the 4th amendment as private and would require a warrant.
The impacts here are with food delivery apps, fitness apps, weather apps, cloud services, ad tech agencies, data resellers/brokers, etc.
by ascotan - Don't forget that beyond exposing your right to privacy from the government, this info is basically a sitting duck for bad actors outside of government, too. I wonder if these companies would be held accountable if the privacy stealing was from the other end. Probably not.by alphawhisky
- The 4th amendment protects people from unreasonable searches by the government. It does not require businesses to do anything special. There are plenty of great reasons to, and even other legal requirements to, protect and limit information gathered by businesses about individuals, but the 4th isn’t one of them.by alex_young
- > Chatrie had opted in to an optional Google “location history” feature that documented his location every few minutes.
Google removed this feature last year because they were tired of dealing with these warrants. Now (Google says) your devices each store their own location history without centralisation.
by microgpt - > Now (Google says) your devices each store their own location history without centralisation.
...I smell a "backdoor" that's in the shape of the "Locate my device" and similar such systems. Unless there's no Android subsystem that will dredge up and present info about where a phone has been, then this demand seems totally plausible:
"We know that you can cause a device to report its historical location information. Cause all of the devices that were within area X between times T and G to report their positions during that time to us, the police. Here's our warrant."
by simoncion - Fantastic. One step closer to making holding personal data a liability.by tencentshill
- I always like to mention how Paula Broadwell was identified as David Petraeus' mistress as it's a good example of how even without a phone you can still be identified.
- FBI had three distinct IPs linked to emails
- They geolocated those back to 3 different hotels
- They pulled the guest list from each of the hotels
- Did a "join" on them and the only guest at all 3 was Broadwell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paula_Broadwell#Petraeus_affai...
by alexpotato - obligatory link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_constructionby novaleaf
- This is also a great example of map resection.by remarkEon
- The whole Petraeus affair[1] is a wiki 'telenovela'. The only things missing are references to Corintian leather. I will share gossip tomorrow, even if old news.by ptsneves
- Similarly, for the people who don't see the big deal about geo-data, consider that knowing (A) where a phone "goes to work" and (B) where it "sleeps" is usually enough to uniquely identify a person, even when there's a large degree of inaccuracy in the coordinates.
Almost nobody who works near my office lives in my apartment complex, and vice-versa.
by Terr_