Another Viewpoint: Approach new technology with caution – Opinion – Sarasota Herald-Tribune
New technology can make it easier to catch criminals, but also to implicate innocent people in the process.
A Gainesville resident’s recent experience showed the need for caution and safeguards when using such technology. As NBC News reported, Zachary McCoy received a letter in January telling him that the Gainesville Police Department requested information related to his Google account — which the company would be releasing in seven days, unless he went to court to block it.
The letter lacked details on exactly what the police wanted except for a case number, which led McCoy to an investigation report on a burglary 10 months earlier. The crime happened at an elderly woman’s home less than a mile from where McCoy lived.
He knew he had nothing to do with the break-in, but was worried about being arrested, so he hired Gainesville attorney Caleb Kenyon. Kenyon found that the letter was prompted by a “geofence warrant,” which seeks records for any devices in a certain area during a specific period.
McCoy, an avid biker, recorded his rides on an exercise-tracking app that used his phone’s location services — which relayed his movements to Google. McCoy took frequent loops through his neighborhood, and found that his route on the day of the burglary passed the victim’s house three times in an hour.
“It was a nightmare scenario,” he told NBC News. “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. And I was the lead suspect.”
Geofence warrants are increasingly being used by law enforcement agencies around the country to solve a variety of crimes. But they can also implicate innocent people, such as an Arizona man who was wrongly arrested for murder largely based on Google data received from a geofence warrant.
McCoy told NBC News that he might have ended up in a similar situation if his parents hadn’t given him money to hire a lawyer. Kenyon filed a court motion seeking to void the warrant and block the release of any further information. The State Attorney’s Office ended up withdrawing the warrant and police were persuaded that McCoy was not involved in the crime.
The case raises constitutional questions. The Fourth Amendment requires warrants to be based on probable cause and that police must specifically state what property is being seized. But geofence warrants let police conduct sweeping searches of phone data from large numbers of people.
The situation shows the need for the legal system to catch up with technological changes, and for law enforcement and the public to both use caution. People should also take note of the information they’re sharing with Google and other technology companies, including the terms of service to which they’re agreeing.
While mistakenly becoming a suspect in a criminal case is an extreme example, there are plenty of other ways in which personal data can be misused.
This editorial was originally published by the Gainesville Sun.
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