A less than random cop but still anecdata of one. Maybe an RCT of Spanish police attitudes towards crime-associated tech brands would be more convincing of a thesis broader than “one journalist heard one cop.”
I think he just made a self-aware observation: noticing a trait being unusually common among criminals he investigates makes him subconsciously associate it with crime even in the general population. Then somebody decided to translate "puede ser" as "must be" and put it in the headline to bait Pixel owners, and now the self-aware cop just looks ignorant instead.
this comment seems to indicate a tip of the iceburg situation in law enforcement-at-scale versus crime-at-scale! human (and tech) evolution demand innovations, yet self-motivated predatory peoples also can be quick to benefit and adapt new tech. lots of quick corollaries available from this..
It's not quite that. LaLiga got a ruling (310/2024, Dec-18-2024) So that they can demand Spanish ISPs to block IPS that LaLiga claims are used to pirate soccer games. But as one would expect, piracy like this involves some CDNing, and therefore CloudFlare IPs. But since those don't necessarily point to individual customers on the other side, in practice it means parts of the internet don't work well in Spain while a game is going on, as the IP blocks that are deemed to be full of piracy are hosting all kinds of other things.
So the issue isn't whether piracy is getting stopped or not, but that the blast radius hits a whole lot of people, including other cloudflare customers.
their opinion is from their dept reflected in their meetings and street corner conversations. if there were accountability that officer would not feel safe saying that.
The headline is exaggerated to make the cops sound like idiots. If they suspect someone might be a drug dealer (fair - it's a clue), that's very different from thinking they "must" be a drug dealer.
Your characterization is under-exaggerated to make this problem sound normal. It's not.
> Every time we see a Google Pixel, we suspect it might belong to a drug dealer
Being a Pixel or GrapheneOS user should never be a "clue" of criminality. It should never result in police detaining you or rummaging through your phone. Any police that acts in this way is indeed an "idiot."
I don't know what specifically it means because I don't know how law enforcement works in Spain. Do you?
It seems like you're asking me to imagine something, but I'm not taking the bait. I'm not going to confuse imagining things with having evidence for them.
It at the very least means people with Pixels or GrapheneOS are treated unfairly by law enforcement. It's unfair because owning either of those is in no way indicative of a crime. You can't possibly IANAL your way out of this fact.
It's rich to accuse others of "baiting" while engaging in sealioning. I'm not the one trying to strip all meaning from words.
Not a random cop, but the leader of an entire operation.