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Comment by nicolashahn | Hacker News Reader

Note to self: if I'm ever going to murder someone, turn off my phone, or at least the things in my phone that track what I'm doing and where I am.

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So they will see that the phone was on continuously for two years, then the night of the murder it was switched of for 6 hours and has been on ever since. Not at all suspicious...

(this is data your service provider already has, and I wouldn't be surprised if this is already used to flag weird behaviour)

Even better, I find that not murdering people is a much easier solution to this problem.

Murder is -obviously- a hyperbole (though I'm sure a certain H. Reiser would agree).

You can make a case for anything voluntarily involving destroying your privacy. Compare to GDR. You were always watched, period. The same's true now, but its partly voluntarily. Is it desirable? You should decide on that on a case-by-case scenario. Schneier wrote several essays on this matter (here's one [1] and a more recent one [2]) and his latest book, Data and Goliath also covers this subject.

Interestingly the more we centralise on our smartphones, the more difficult voluntarily leaving it home becomes. We already put all kind of NFC cards like our bank and public transport on our phones these days. What's next, unlocking the car via NFC?

[1] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2006/05/the_eternal...

[2] https://www.schneier.com/essays/archives/2016/03/data_is_a_t...

I’m not arguing against privacy, or for this kind of abusive tech used in the system. I’m just saying that this particular story doesn’t make for a great exemplar, anymore than the guy who was nailed because of his smart water meter. There are plenty of examples of surveillance abuse and slapdash prosecution without having to rely on this.

My brother is building appartement buildings. In some they are using NFC card as access key for the appartements. So you might one day enter your home with your phone (without adding IoT or something, out of the box).

Dropped it in the toilet?

Could have sworn that phone radios have a unique identifier independent of the customer id (stored in a sim or the phone depending on the network tech).

> Could have sworn that phone radios have a unique identifier independent of the customer id

Of course they do, multiple ids in fact (IMEI/ICCID/MEID). Not sure how that’s relevant in this thread though.

Or establish a pattern of leaving your phone (on) at home a few times per week, so when you're doing your murder without your phone, it does not look out of place. You'll just have to provide an alibi on what you were doing and why you didn't take your phone.

Or just solve your problem by non murderous means, since you have the leisure to plan for it several months in advance?

So hire a killer with bitcoins you mined & mixed months earlier? /jk

Better to just leave it on and at home, maybe have it stream some movies/series from Netflix or something, that way it would even serve as an alibi.

"Never left my house, spend the whole evening watching XY on my phone in bed, you can check the content providers logs!".

... prop it up on your bed at a good viewing angle and have something lightly vibrate the bed periodically ...

That way the damn things accelerometer has some data - Law & Order style shows need to up their game in the smartphone era.

This could work, but if not then you’ve handed the prosecutors ironclad evidence of your premeditation.

Well, yeah, but the phone is going to tattle anyway you look at it. Frankly, the advice is more useful to people who are worried about being tracked than an idiot planning murder. I get the feeling a domestic abuse case is going to be a better bet to use this technique to buy time to get away before we see someone try to hide a murder. Those child tracking tech items are probably going to be a gold mine for abusive partners.

I know it's implied in your comment, but I hope that upon discovering someone was playing Netflix at home and not watching it, that the conclusion is still only "he was not at home while his Netflix is playing" and not "he put on Netflix to premeditate a murder." If he lies and says he was at home then that's perjury, which only may be evidence of premeditation.

I know this whole thread was tongue-in-cheek, but when someone's life is on the line for murder you do need to remember that you're trying to prove that a person did it, and it's not sufficient to disprove the ways that they didn't do it.

Hypothetically, if police caught your periodic-vibration setup in action, and figured out what it's meant for, and found some kind of evidence that you had just recently created this setup, and turned it on before leaving the house and (according to other evidence) committing a homicide…

Well, I don't know about "ironclad", but it would be circumstantial evidence that you were trying to cover something up, which in combination with other evidence might be able to establish premeditation.

Turning off your phone leaves a hole in the data, but that hole can say a lot. The start and end times and locations are known, and can be correlated with other events to suggest why the hole exists and what might have happened during that gap. That sort of circumstantial evidence was a part of the recent Laura Babcock murder case.

That evidence also speaks to premeditation, and mens rea.

Or it could just mean that your battery died.

Sure, unless like most people you’re obsessive about not letting that happen. If your phone dies just long enough to hide your location during a crime there’s other evidence of you committing...

...let’s just say you’d better be perfect in every other aspect of that crime.

I'm not. My battery died yesterday and I managed not to kill anybody.

The US military has used phones’ on/off state in the Middle Eastern war theaters as an indication of potential terrorist activity. Based on other meta data like the number of hops to a known terrorist phone number (phone number A contacted phone number B which contacted phone number C which has contact with a terrorist’s phone number) and the temporal proximity to (assumed) terrorists switching their phones off and on, you got a terrorist rating. If you were unlucky, you got drone-murdered. I can’t find the exact source but this article[1] describes the practice of drone-murdering potential terrorists, and the Talibans counter-strategy.

[1] https://www.rt.com/news/nsa-drones-civilian-casualties-383/

Leave them at home for an alibi.

> Leave them at home for an alibi.

Presumably that isn't a great alibi though. The activity on those devices probably wouldn't match the "normal" activity when one is home, so I suspect it would be easy for a prosecutor to argue that the devices were just left at home.

A good point, but normal for some people might be to leave it untouched whilst at home.

Now that is quite interesting. As others have pointed out turning a phone off could provide evidence against you.

Leaving it at home, or having someone else carry it with them could provide an alibi.

It’s a truism, but location data for a phone only proves where the phone was. Or where the phone thought it was. I wonder how quick a prosecutor might be to point this out. Especially when they might be less quick to do so if the location data suggested your phone was at the scene of the crime.

I wonder if you could poke a hole in that (widen the "where it thought it was" doubt) by pointing out incidents like when Facebook thought nearly everyone was in Philadelphia for a few hours.

What, were you not invited?

Damn I always get left out of everything :-( lol I posted "Man it's weird having my house in Philadelphia" or something along those lines when it was saying that and I saw a friend that I hadn't seen in a while the other day and he was like "Hey I thought you moved to Philly? What're you doing here?" haha

My phone infrequently thinks I've left home without actually moving - far enough to trigger the 400m geofence around it and to switch the webcam into "I've gone out, HIGH ALERT TIME!"

I assume it's because it's not getting good GPS (I'm inside a block of flats), there's no cellular signal, and therefore latches onto a visible WIFI SSID (I can see 15+) that it's got a location for which just happens to be [somewhere else].

(Similar to when my phone used to think Euston Station was in Manchester because it was picking up the SSIDs from the trains as part of AGPS.)

And move out of the US

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