[fharper1961]

Location data can also be used to help prove your innocence.

It sucks that this innocent person ended up suffering. Hopefully law enforcement will become better at figuring out false positives before arresting someone.

I do like that the gov. doesn't have direct access. Seems to me like the more independent parties required to access the data, the lower the chances of abuse.

[gist]

> Location data can also be used to help prove your innocence.

Well not really. If that were the case and if someone was going to commit a crime they could simply place their phone in someone else's auto (let's say without them even knowing) and then have that data be the data that is 'them'. This would quickly unravel. Besides I don't think it's so much that the data is useful other than it gives clues and points in a particular direction whereby the police can then narrow down or look further into a particular suspect.

[dontbenebby]

> Location data can also be used to help prove your innocence.

I can retain receipts from gas stations, getting a soda at the corner store, etc without needing to beam my realtime location data to the cloud.

[KirinDave]

I've never seen a gas station receipt with a timestamp. Is that common in other places?

[jhayward]

I scan all my receipts, and every gas station receipt has a date and time stamp. How accurate they are is anyone's guess.

I also always use a credit card for any transaction which gives another 'I was there' proof point.

[dontbenebby]

The actual receipt usually has a timestamp, but IIRC credit card statements just list the date (not time).

[dontbenebby]

To be honest I don't recall either but some places do have a timestamp. (Restaurants being a big one)

[ehsankia]

I'm a little confused here. It turned out that it was his mother's ex-boyfriend, who had taken his car without permission. That explains the car, but how does it explain the location? Did he just happen to also leave close to there and was moving in a similar pattern? Was the phone inside the car?

Really, the issue here was the car, without which they wouldn't have had enough evidence to get the person's information in the first place. Are you not partly responsible to whom you give your car to?

[nocturnial]

From the article: "...Mr. Molina had sometimes signed in to other people’s phones to check his Google account. That could lead someone to appear in two places at once, though it was not clear whether that happened in this case."

If this is how it really happened then the investigators didn't even bother to crosscheck the data with the cell tower information (assuming the telco logs this info). Sending false location data to google shouldn't be that hard, but it should be a lot harder to fake the cell tower connections.

[jfk13]

If someone steals my car and uses it when committing a crime, I can accept that may well lead to questioning me. But I don't think it justifies keeping me in jail for a week.

[ehsankia]

That's fair, though I'm still unsure how his phone happened to also correlate with the crime.