Use the cloud for tracking your rides?

On Monday, March 9, 2020 at 1:25:23 AM UTC-7, Rolf Mantel wrote:
Am 08.03.2020 um 04:48 schrieb news18:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/03...cked-his-bike-
ride-past-a-burglary-and-that-made-him-a-suspect

"I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was
putting me at the scene of the crime," said Zachary McCoy. Yep, that's
all it took. Google's legal investigations support team emailed him to
let him know that local police had demanded information related to his
Google account. The man's lawyer dug around and learned that the notice
had been prompted by a "geofence warrant," a police surveillance tool
that casts a virtual dragnet over crime scenes, sweeping up Google
location data — drawn from users' GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular
connections — from everyone nearby.

The story is a bit inconsistent. While Google places this guy to the
place of the burglary, it also gives him a water-proof alibi: he never
spent more than 30 seconds or so in the vicinity of the crime location...

Precisely. So any cop that would take his presence as anything other than a coincidence should be forcibly ejected from the police department.

On Mon, 9 Mar 2020 11:18:19 -0400, Frank Krygowski
wrote:

On 3/9/2020 4:25 AM, Rolf Mantel wrote:
Am 08.03.2020 um 04:48 schrieb news18:
https://yro.slashdot.org/story/20/03...cked-his-bike-
ride-past-a-burglary-and-that-made-him-a-suspect

"I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was
putting me at the scene of the crime," said Zachary McCoy. Yep, that's
all it took. Google's legal investigations support team emailed him to
let him know that local police had demanded information related to his
Google account. The man's lawyer dug around and learned that the notice
had been prompted by a "geofence warrant," a police surveillance tool
that casts a virtual dragnet over crime scenes, sweeping up Google
location data — drawn from users' GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular
connections — from everyone nearby.

The story is a bit inconsistent.* While Google places this guy to the
place of the burglary, it also gives him a water-proof alibi: he never
spent more than 30 seconds or so in the vicinity of the crime location...

Good point.

While I'm not an investigator by any means I was superficially
involved in an investigation of a Mess Sergeant who was suspected of
falsifying mess attendance figures. I was called in by the OSI and
questioned. Had I been on mess count that day? Did I remember how many
I had counted? Did I see anything strange going on?

When the question and answer period was over I asked the OSI guy, "why
me?" and he told me that when investigating they interview everyone
that, "was there, or had been there, or might go there". He said that
this not only might uncover the bad guy but also eliminated all the
good guys.

I suspect that civilian police do the same.
--
cheers,

John B.

On Mon, 9 Mar 2020 13:19:06 -0700 (PDT), Tom Kunich
wrote:

On Monday, March 9, 2020 at 1:25:23 AM UTC-7, Rolf Mantel wrote:
The story is a bit inconsistent. While Google places this guy to the
place of the burglary, it also gives him a water-proof alibi: he never
spent more than 30 seconds or so in the vicinity of the crime location...

Precisely. So any cop that would take his presence as anything
other than a coincidence should be forcibly ejected from the police
department.

Unfortunately, it's easy enough to contrive an explanation. He could
be acting as a looking for someone else doing the actual burglary
while riding around the area looking for police presence or the owners
return. The local homeless do that when they're doing a burglary.

Google does not log continuous GPS locations (often called dragon
droppings). Looking at my location history (Google Maps Timeline) at:
https://www.google.com/maps/timeline
I see only spotty GPS locations staggered hours apart. Google seems
to be more interested in where I've been, than when I was there. For
example, here's today's drive from Home to Henry Cowell Park, a 3 mile
walk, a stop at the local thrift shop, drive to Chef Liu restaurant,
shopping at Safeway, and return home.
http://www.learnbydestroying.com/jeffl/crud/Timeliine-Map-2020-03-09.jpg
Notice that there are several straight lines allegedly showing where I
was driving. There are no "straight" roads in my mountainous area.
The only positions that are accurate are the end points of these
straight lines. Unless Google is hiding some additional GPS locations
in its database, I don't think any DA would prosecute solely on the
basis of such miserable GPS data.





--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

On Mon, 09 Mar 2020 19:31:21 -0700, Jeff Liebermann wrote:

On Mon, 9 Mar 2020 13:19:06 -0700 (PDT), Tom Kunich
wrote:

On Monday, March 9, 2020 at 1:25:23 AM UTC-7, Rolf Mantel wrote:
The story is a bit inconsistent. While Google places this guy to the
place of the burglary, it also gives him a water-proof alibi: he never
spent more than 30 seconds or so in the vicinity of the crime
location...

Precisely. So any cop that would take his presence as anything other
than a coincidence should be forcibly ejected from the police
department.

Unfortunately, it's easy enough to contrive an explanation. He could be
acting as a looking for someone else doing the actual burglary while
riding around the area looking for police presence or the owners return.
The local homeless do that when they're doing a burglary.

Google does not log continuous GPS locations (often called dragon
droppings).

I think you'll find that when it comes to the "other tasks" that the
rider was actuall using the device for, Google may have frequent wayponts
to enable accurate figures.

Not google, but a GPS device we have actually stores very accurate path
records. And golge actualy provides a number of services that utilse
(hidden way?) points on their maps.

On Tuesday, March 10, 2020 at 2:31:19 AM UTC, Jeff Liebermann wrote:
On Mon, 9 Mar 2020 13:19:06 -0700 (PDT), Tom Kunich
wrote:

On Monday, March 9, 2020 at 1:25:23 AM UTC-7, Rolf Mantel wrote:
The story is a bit inconsistent. While Google places this guy to the
place of the burglary, it also gives him a water-proof alibi: he never
spent more than 30 seconds or so in the vicinity of the crime location....

Precisely. So any cop that would take his presence as anything
other than a coincidence should be forcibly ejected from the police
department.

Unfortunately, it's easy enough to contrive an explanation. He could
be acting as a looking for someone else doing the actual burglary
while riding around the area looking for police presence or the owners
return. The local homeless do that when they're doing a burglary.

Google does not log continuous GPS locations (often called dragon
droppings). Looking at my location history (Google Maps Timeline) at:
https://www.google.com/maps/timeline
I see only spotty GPS locations staggered hours apart. Google seems
to be more interested in where I've been, than when I was there. For
example, here's today's drive from Home to Henry Cowell Park, a 3 mile
walk, a stop at the local thrift shop, drive to Chef Liu restaurant,
shopping at Safeway, and return home.
http://www.learnbydestroying.com/jeffl/crud/Timeliine-Map-2020-03-09.jpg
Notice that there are several straight lines allegedly showing where I
was driving. There are no "straight" roads in my mountainous area.
The only positions that are accurate are the end points of these
straight lines. Unless Google is hiding some additional GPS locations
in its database, I don't think any DA would prosecute solely on the
basis of such miserable GPS data.





--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558

The app I use to report my heart rate (on screen and once a kilometre by voice) is called Polar Beat. It also tracks my ride by GPS and puts them up on the screen not in straight lines but in recognizable road curves, and then automatically stores them on my phone -- and who knows where else, even though I make conscious efforts in settings and preferences files to stay out of the cloud and not to have other apps report my location, as a matter of a right to privacy.

And, frankly, I resent even that much. Where did these wannabe thieves at Google (they once tried to steal literary copyrights en masse until a wide-awake American judge stuck a broomstick in their wheel) get the right from to steal my private information as a default? The default should be "Zero reporting unless consciously selected".

Andre Jute
Liberty is indivisible

On Tue, 10 Mar 2020 07:47:26 -0000 (UTC), news18
wrote:

I think you'll find that when it comes to the "other tasks" that the
rider was actuall using the device for, Google may have frequent wayponts
to enable accurate figures.

Agreed. One might presume that Google time stamps all the "events"
that they wish to record. In my limited experience watching what
Google records for my daily activities using:
https://www.google.com/maps/timeline
I've found that most of my location data seems to be concentrated in
places where I stop moving. In other words, my travel stops and
endpoints. I can only guess why the intermediate data is missing. It
might be that erratic changes in location data, which is common on
tracking data loggers, is being properly filtered. It might be that
my phone is not providing reliable position reports when the signal is
poor, which I probably the case. My previous dumb-phone (LG VX8300)
produced maps that showed only the travel endpoints with unrealistic
straight line paths in between. However, I recently switched to an
Android smartphone (Google Pixel 1), which gives slightly better
tracking when I'm moving. If you take another look at my map from
yesterday:
http://www.learnbydestroying.com/jeffl/crud/Timeliine-Map-2020-03-09.jpg
you'll see that only one part of my travel path is a proper sweeping
curve (Home through Glen Arbor), while all the other paths are
unrealistic straight lines. If the riders path happened to pass near
the location of the burglary, and it resembled the collection of
straight line paths shown in my map, I would have little difficulty
demonstrating the inaccuracy of the GPS locations. However, if the
rider stopped next to the burglary, and lingered for a time, there
might be a case as it would constitute a waypoint with much better
accuracy. With sufficient timing marks at the endpoints and
waypoints, the average speed of the ride could be calculated to
determine if the rider had enough time to stop, perform a burglary,
and continue his exercise ride.

If you look at other Google Timeline Maps, they're all full of
unrealistic straight lines:
https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbm=isch&q=google+timeline+maps

Not google, but a GPS device we have actually stores very accurate path
records. And golge actualy provides a number of services that utilse
(hidden way?) points on their maps.

Nope. Continuous lat-long positions are not reported to location
based service providers. What is delivered to the cellular provider
is the raw satellite delays from the phone. That is combined with
WAAS correction data, AGPS (Assisted GPS) data from the cell towers
and rounded off using map data to insure that the phone being tracked
is on a roadway (in order to meet the FCC accuracy requirements). I
can go into excruciating detail on how this all works (later). The
conglomerated data from the cellular service provider is then
delivered to the location based service provider (911, Google, etc)
for additional processing, storage, and abuse. The important point is
that dumb phones and smart phones both send the same information to
the cellular provider. The smartphone can process the satellite
delays and WAAS data to provide a lat-long position while the
dumb-phone cannot. The smartphone location data is used by apps
running on the smartphone, but is NOT sent to the cellular provider
for post processing. What I don't know is how much data is collected
and stored by Google and how often.



--
Jeff Liebermann
150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com
Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558