WRAL journalists found out that Google is giving police the city of Raleigh, North Carolina, the identifiers of mobile devices that were near the crime scenes at the time of their commission. In 2017, Google helped police investigate at least four crimes.
As WRAL reporter Tyler Dukes managed to find out, one of the investigations was connected with the search for a sex maniac, the second was with the investigation of arson, which left about 40 people without a roof over their heads. Two more cases concerned murder investigations. Google gave the police the IMEI numbers and coordinates of the devices, as well as the exact time when they were registered in a certain radius from the crime scenes. The police then sent requests to the company to identify several potential suspects. At the moment, the investigation of the cases has not yet been completed. It is known that the police managed to detain a suspect in one of the murders.
Police say the practice is a natural evolution of criminal investigation methods, and human rights activists believe it threatens the privacy of innocent users. “People are willing to share many of the details of their lives with Google. But do they understand that by doing so they are sharing them with law enforcement? ”Says Jonathan Jones, a former Durham attorney who now leads the North Carolina Open Government Coalition at Elon University.
Most modern phones, tablets and laptops have built-in location tracking that uses GPS data, as well as Wi-Fi and mobile network connections. Even if the user turns off GPS geolocation, a device connected to a mobile network or Wi-Fi still transmits its coordinates to the provider - albeit less accurate than when using GPS. Police spokesman Raleigh noted that Google can track not only Android phones, but any device that has at least one Google app installed. As for Android devices, theoretically Google can track them even when GPS, Wi-Fi and mobile networks are turned off (Quarz journalists wrote about this last year).
