Google's location data inadvertently turns innocent people into suspects

One fine day, you take your bike to the street, plan a few laps to relax your mind, don't forget to turn on the location tracking feature on your phone to see how far you are, and then suddenly you're in trouble. with the law. This is exactly what this unlucky man encountered.

Mr. Zachary McCoy, who lives in Gainesville, Florida, United States, accidentally rides a bike through a block of house where the burglary happened, and turned on location tracking on his phone, which made him a suspect. It's a crime.

McCoy used the RunKeeper application to track his cycling, and turned on all of Google's location services, allowing the application and Google to track his location in real time. The session ended, McCoy went home and then received an email notification from Google's legal investigation support team. Email content said local police have requested information related to his Google account due to suspicion of McCoy related to the burglary. Although this was not enough for the police to accuse McCoy, it has caused him a lot of trouble with Gainesville county investigation agency.

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McCoy said he did not know the victim and had never visited the house, but the police required him to provide more convincing alibi because the location data they obtained from Google showed him in very close when the burglary happened. McCoy's parents had to spend a large sum of money to hire a lawyer to protect his rights. The hired lawyer did a closer look and found that the email from Google involved a scoping order - something that allowed the police to scan location data around the crime scene. .

As such, Google clearly shared McCoy's anonymous location data with the police. McCoy used an Android phone linked to his Google account, and the police seemed to want to access all of his location and usage data in the days before, during and after the theft. .

Worrying, but McCoy kept calm to put things together. He opened the RunKeeper app on his phone, looked up his cycling route on the day of the burglary, and realized he had walked through that house three times in just one hour. All are stored, and Google has collected this information to provide to the police when requested.

After many days of struggle, the efforts of McCoy and his lawyer finally paid off. Gainesville's law enforcement agency was forced to withdraw his search warrant, retract McCoy's request to collect Google data and remove him from the suspect list. However, the controversy over how Google collects user data, how to use this data, and privacy and personal data ownership issues will be raised a lot in the near future. .