Google tracked a man's bike ride past a burgled home. This made him a suspect.

G-MAN2004

G-MAN2004

G-MAN2004

Caporegime
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https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-new...-ride-past-burglarized-home-made-him-n1151761

The email arrived on a Tuesday afternoon in January, startling Zachary McCoy as he prepared to leave for his job at a restaurant in Gainesville, Florida.

It was from Google’s legal investigations support team, writing to let him know that local police had demanded information related to his Google account. The company said it would release the data unless he went to court and tried to block it. He had just seven days.

“I was hit with a really deep fear,” McCoy, 30, recalled, even though he couldn’t think of anything he’d done wrong. He had an Android phone, which was linked to his Google account, and, like millions of other Americans, he used an assortment of Google products, including Gmail and YouTube. Now police seemingly wanted access to all of it.
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And another recent example:

Police arrested an innocent man for murder using his Google location data and imprisoned him for 6 days

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/ar...nt-man-murder-using-Google-location-data.html

A man is suing Arizona police for $1.5million after he was arrested and held for a murder he did not commit after Google's GPS tracker wrongly placed him at the scene of the 2018 crime.

Jorge Molina, 23, of Arizona, was arrested at his job at Macy's and spent six days in jail in December 2018 for the murder of Joseph Knight, 29, in March of that year, who was shot nine times outside his Avondale apartment.

Molina was fired from his job but was later released from jail without charge after prosecutors noted numerous inconsistencies with the location data that had tied him to the killing.
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If these two articles do not make people concerned for their privacy in the future, then I'm not sure what will. The usual 'if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to fear' comments do not stand here, because these two men had nothing to hide and yet one of them had to spend almost a week locked up and the other had to part with thousands of dollars for a lawyer.

Examples like these are going to become more frequent as police forces and governments look to utilise every aspect of technology in their quest to catch a few more criminals control us, and it means further erosion of our rights as well as the potential to ruin innocent lives... No thanks.

I'll just leave this here too:

NSA phone program cost $100 million but produced only two unique leads

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/25/us/politics/nsa-phone-program.html
 
It's just the tip of the iceberg, especially when you have China building our future network of CCTV cameras and stories like this:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/science...on-app-Clearview-AI-intel-daughters-date.html
Billionaire supermarket tycoon used creepy facial recognition app Clearview AI to identify the man his daughter was having dinner with after spotting them in Manhattan restaurant Cipriani Downtown
The controversial Clearview app works by searching its colossal database of more than three billion portraits — taken from social media sites such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter — for matches.
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With this kind of technology it's only a matter of time until people are being "shadowbanned" in all walks of life and not just the internet. Voted for Brexit or Trump? posted the dictionary definition of what a woman is online? too bad you won't get that job you attended interview for this morning (or any other for that matter) - and they call us the fascists!
 
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G-MAN2004 said:
Tell that to people in China. Or go back in time and tell that to Germans during the rise of Hitler.
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I get your general concern but you do seem to over invest in this. Are privacy concerns a real and valid topic to consider? Yes, absolutely. Should they define how you think and talk and post? Not in my view.
 
sigma said:
Do they still not provide data to the police?

If not Google, I'm sure the network provider would.
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Years ago I was on the jury for a murder trial. Even then the prosecution pulled loads of incriminating data from phone company data.

I'm also acquainted with someone who's step son got convicted of something based partially on his mast tracking data in the last year.

The NBC article is a load of alarmist rubbish.

Basically, police ask reasonable questions, paranoid guy lawyers up and tries to stop them obtaining the data that would have made it clear he wasn't a suspect and in the process prolongs the whole thing.
 
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