[xyzzyz]

I hate this change. I loved how the original Timeline worked, and now it's unusable. I don't care about courts subpoeaning my data. I'd love to opt in to previous status quo. I don't care about the loss of "privacy" in the context that was never important to me.

Most people are like me: they don't care about being protected from the courts, because the courts don't pose risk to them, and as a matter of statistical fact, they are correct.

[idle_zealot]

This position is insanely illiberal. This isn't about your individual safety, or how willing you as an individual are to abdicate your right to privacy. It's about the knock-on effect of living under panopticon conditions, the chilling effect, the loss of trust, and the nearly unlimited potential for abuse. This individualistic attitude makes it so easy to divide and conquer each and every one of your rights and protections, and will leave you less free as an individual than if you were willing to look at the bigger picture and stand up for rights you don't personally care about.

[Natsu]

Maybe, but in MN, they just decided as a matter of the state constitution that this basically isn't allowable.

You see, the cops had a murder in a remote place. They got a warrant, and the warrant showed 12 people in and out of a small area near the murder, of which one phone went there many times.

They got another warrant, for that one phone, and traced it back to someone who is obviously the murderer. The courts decided to suppress this, never mind the cops got warrants at both steps, and their investigation was as minimally invasive as one could imagine for this sort of thing.

So it's not unreasonable to wonder just what we're protecting sometimes, as I understand that while the decision here doesn't technically ban all geofence warrants, it makes them nearly impossible as a practical matter.

One can read the decision here:

https://mncourts.gov/_media/migration/appellate/supreme-cour...

[drugstorecowboy]

Exactly, and to make sure that never happens again why not just arrest all 12 of those people until they prove their innocence? With enough constant surveillance we can be positive that no bad person ever gets away with anything.

Honestly, do you look at the justice system in the United States and think "You know the real issue here is that not enough people are being punished"?

[Natsu]

> Honestly, do you look at the justice system in the United States and think "You know the real issue here is that not enough people are being punished"?

I have a family member who was murdered. I have a lot of sympathy for victims of violent crimes like this and a hard time understanding people who want to let the murderers go free, because I know what it's like living under the threat of one who kept a list of who they intended to kill next.

[hn_acc1]

My sympathies for your loss. That sucks badly.

But look at how many people have been unjustly/incorrectly imprisoned for many years in the US, often based on poverty or racism. Would you be willing to jail 5 people for life-without-parole if you're 100% sure ONE of them was the murderer of your family member? What about two people?

[Natsu]

I've never seen someone get sent to prison just because their phone was too close to a crime scene, there's always more to corroborate it because it's not much on its own, even if the MN case comes pretty close with only one person in a remote area with the dead body over and over who also coincidentally had motive, etc. Most of the famous cases of what you mention rely on humans identifying a person and DNA later exonerating them.

So I'm loathe to rule out the use of more accurate ways to pinpoint investigations when the status quo is someone who thinks they saw the person at the scene, when we know how unreliable that is.

That feels like throwing out DNA because there are many explanations of why it might be at a crime scene in favor of good old fashioned witness identification, never mind one is a lot better than the other, even if both of them have been misused terribly at times.

That's why I think we should want the cops to use methods that cause fewer people to get wrongly investigated, because it is a burden. It's true, your phone being too close to a crime scene doesn't make you a criminal, but it's probably a better reason for investigating you than traditional things like "I saw a guy who looked like that at the scene" which has much more frequently caused the harm you cite, and yet it's been a staple of courts longer than any of us have been alive.

[xyzzyz]

Sorry, I’m not chilled at all by the prospect that the court can subpoena my data from Goole. It can already issue a warrant to arrest me, and to search my actual home.

[avidiax]

The trouble is that you aren't chilled at all today.

Tomorrow's government may decide that attending certain protests, or having "associated" with certain people was always a crime. It doesn't even need to be "retroactive", since enforcement and interpretation of the law is always adjustable in the present.

This sort of thing is happening today in certain countries. Why are you so sure it won't happen to you in yours?

[amanaplanacanal]

It kind of sounds like you are saying you don't care if other people are hurt, as long as it doesn't impact you. I hope that isn't what you actually mean.

[Planktonne]

That's not a good faith, or even vaguely accurate, reading of the parent comment.

[amanaplanacanal]

I'm not sure how else to read this:

Most people are like me: they don't care about being protected from the courts, because the courts don't pose risk to them, and as a matter of statistical fact, they are correct.

[shadowgovt]

The problem is, unfortunately, those data lakes are in the category "safe until they aren't." Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws in the European sphere, for example, because they know that the courts (and executive) don't pose a risk to most Germans... Until suddenly they do, and the only defense is not having aggregated the data in the first place.

To be clear, no disagreement with your self-risk-assessment, and reasonable people can disagree on where their paranoia threshold is.

[pocksuppet]

Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws. And yet... Germany has a central registry of all Jews, because of the address registration and the religion tax. The last thing you would expect them to have!

[47282847]

Huh? My understanding is that they have religion data only for catholics/protestants, and only on local level, not in a central database. Which yes that should be killed too but no other faith is recorded, since they only collect taxes for those two.

[traderj0e]

The courts are already a risk there cause of how they handle speech

[shadowgovt]

Places that aren't the United States aren't obliged to treat their history of speech the way the US does.

The US's protections are rooted in observations of local authority (and Crown-backed authority) trying to disrupt what the revolutionaries self-observed to be peaceful demonstrations, peaceful entry of thought into the public discourse, and public discourse itself. It's grounded in Enlightenment-era belief that unsuppressed discourse is the best path to real truths, and respect for real truths via the distributed, democratic comprehension of them are the foundation of good governance and good society.

Germany watched a significantly post-Enlightenment, free, democratic people talk its way from democracy straight into fascism, and concluded that some kinds of discourse are so toxic to the actual practice of discovery of the aforementioned truths that they are to be excluded from the public sphere.

Both cultures came by their conclusions honestly and there's some merit to both points of view.

[traderj0e]

Germany had restricted speech before WWI or WWII too, and they're mistaken if they think it's going to protect them from fascism this time.

[Cider9986]

Most people don't have your luxury of not worrying about government overreach.

It sure would have been useful for governments in the South to grab the location data of enslaved people trying to escape—would they, like the average user today, have known to turn off these settings?

It's great for Texas to buy data from brokers about women trying to access reproductive healthcare across state lines from apps carelessly sharing it. The courts don't pose a risk to you until the law changes and suddenly they do.

This is about the government getting data through a loophole that violates the 4th amendment—the difference between a society that collects everything and presumes guilt, and one that targets specific people when they're suspected of a specific crime.

[pocksuppet]

If you'd like, I can develop a product that will track your location and report it to the police in real-time for you.