Cops used dead man’s finger in attempt to access his phone | Hacker News Reader

Cops used dead man’s finger in attempt to access his phone

tampabay.com

53 pointslnguyen50 comments

Concerning the dead man's privacy, it doesn't matter, he's dead. What matters is the appearance of decency and respect in death because it matters to the family. The article makes me wonder if the police walked up during the funeral and messed with the corpse, but I really doubt that was the case. There is no dignified death. Death ceremonies are performed for the living.

And yet desecrating the dead is almost universally panned, because of its effect on the living. Is using a dead person's finger to unlock their phone desecration? The deceased's family seems to think so.

The corpse was hardly desecrated. It's finger was used in an attempt to figure out why drug dealing killed it. I would posit replacing it's fluids with embalming solution to be more intrusive.

Why do people jump so eagerly to this assumption about the wishes of the dead being unimportant? We honor wishes of the living concerning the exterior world beyond the mere facts about their brain state (e.g., someone can justly want to climb Mount Everest or set a world record, and not just believe they have). Continuing to respest their reasonable wishes after they die is not fundamentally different, e.g., not desecrating their bodies, even if they don't have family who would be upset.

How would this be different from using someone’s fingerprints to identify them, if they had no ID on them or any other ID method? Is that desecration too?

My understanding is that, generally, the purpose of identification is to find living relatives. It's a matter of respect - identification allows for appropriate rites to be provided, while this is taking advantage of the fact that the dead have no rights to use the prints for their own purposes.

Ok, but respect of disrespect is not the same as desecration, which is what was being argued. Just because we don’t like something does not mean we dress it up as something else.

True, desecration is too strong a word in my opinion. I'm not familiar enough with other cultures and religions to say whether that would be true for everyone.

Whether the dead should have the right to privacy is a contentious issue but I think it is indisputable that accessing a dead person's phone violates the privacy of others who had been in contact with him over the phone. He could have private photos, texts, emails of his friends and families who would not want those to be accessed by someone else.

In the US, at the moment, only the owner of the phone is legally treated as having a privacy interest in it, and that interest ends at at the moment of death. You can argue for this to change -- and there are reasonable arguments to make for change! -- but right now it's perfectly legal for police to search a dead person's phone without a warrant.

If it’s a lawyers phone I’d expect the clients would have a legal claim to privacy.

I could also imagine potential HIPAA issues if the device owner was a medical professional.

Other than the potential that the dead owner’s employer might have to give a breach notification, probably not HIPAA issues.

HIPAA restricts what health insurers and providers do with your data, but it doesn't restrict third parties from attempting to get information that the covered entities aren't allowed to give.

Most of these responses are bringing up things where specific information obtained from the phone could be challenged later if someone tried to use it in court. They don't bring up anything that would pre-empt the search of the phone itself, though.

See, for example:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2018/03/22/yes-c...

Choice quote:

And it's entirely legal for police to use the technique, even if there might be some ethical quandaries to consider. Marina Medvin, owner of Medvin Law, said that once a person is deceased, they no longer have a privacy interest in their dead body. That means they no longer have standing in court to assert privacy rights.

Relatives or other interested parties have little chance of stopping cops using fingerprints or other body parts to access smartphones too. "Once you share information with someone, you lose control over how that information is protected and used. You cannot assert your privacy rights when your friend's phone is searched and the police see the messages that you sent to your friend. Same goes for sharing information with the deceased - after you released information to the deceased, you have lost control of privacy," Medvin added.

So, once again: if you're alive, you can assert your Fourth Amendment rights with respect to your phone. Police will need a warrant to search it. Once you're dead, the only person with standing to fight the search on Fourth Amendment grounds is, well, no longer standing. They can search warrantless.

At the moment of death the phone becomes the property of the estate, it’s not like the police get free reign to your stuff because you are dead.

Police can't claim ownership of your phone. But they certainly can search it. See my reply to the other commenter.

Sure, but I would trust the police to handle their data with the same respect and circumspection that they handle all private data they must routinely encounter.

This is a joke, right?

It’s Hacker News. Asking commenters to expand their field of vision past their nose is a losing proposition.

Not a joke at all. The police are not your enemy and they're not out to get you and suck up all your data in order to best violate your privacy.

While I disagree with your view that police reliably handle privacy and personal data with "respect and circumspection", it's unfortunate that you're being downvoted for expressing a legitimate opinion.

Thank you.

I suspect it's probably because the exceptions to the rule bump privacy violations to the top of the news by a very vocal and outraged minority. But if you consider the magnitude of personal data the police must have access to on a daily basis that is kept secure and confidential and eventually destroyed compared to the occasional news story we hear about, they're doing a much better job than we give them credit for.

Also - as IT people, I bet the majority of us have access to a huge amount of personal data on a daily basis as well. I would absolutely say the majority of us treat this data with respect and circumspection and that only a tiny few don't.

Please don't mistake me for a police apologist, I'm well aware of their capabilities and actions, especially border police, but the polarising us vs them culture separates us and makes us disempowered victims. If you genuinely, honestly care about data privacy and the privacy of those you communicate with, use encryption.

That's a rather naive view. If you come to their attention and provide a useful, low-friction solution to achieving their metrics then all those statements become invalid.

This is a hopelessly naive view.

Police training teaches officers to try to elicit evidence of criminal behavior in every interaction with the public.

An officer is always, always, always, trying to find evidence that you have committed a crime any time they are talking to you, observing you, or searching your property. Every interaction with a police officer is an adversarial encounter.

We respect certain rights of the dead because we will eventually join them.

I disagree, we respect the dead because it makes living with memories of the dead person's life easier, and we don't want those memories tarnished.

It's also nice to think we'll be remembered fondly in turn when we die, but it won't matter - we'll be dead!

The phone would belong to those who inherit his estate. What if the corrupt cops use the information found in the phone to steal all or part of that man's estate? The US cops are already known to steal from the living.

There was no mention of corruption, just some ham-fisted investigation.

That is an interesting point about the phone belonging to the estate though. It wasn't mentioned in the article.

It's not corruption; well not individual corruption. It's legal seizure. Police can seize all kinda stuff, even if you didn't do anything illegal.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...

The drug war has turned this country upside down.

"Death ceremonies are performed for the living."

There are all sorts of other beliefs about death out there.

Quite a lot of people believe in the afterlife, that the dead can observe what the living do, and be pleased or upset by it.

Some believe that specific burial rites must be performed in order for the soul of the deceased to rest or go to an afterlife or to not bother the living, and that the body must be intact for this to happen.

Absolutely. I keep the Tibetan 'sky burial' in mind often these days: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sky_burial

and some videos if you're not squeemish: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=sky+burial

But ultimately these are beliefs that are held by living people, shaped by culture and time.

> and that the body must be intact for this to happen.

again, the corpse wasn't desecrated or cut up. It's fingerprint was used to access a phone in an attempt to solve a crime affecting living people.

>Concerning the dead man's privacy, it doesn't matter, he's dead.

Religious people who believe in afterlife would disagree with this, so I think it's still a valid point to discuss in general, although it might not be the point in this particular case.

The man is objectively dead and loss of privacy doesn't affect it any more. The living - you, me, the family of the dead man - want that corpse and the memories we associate with it treated with a certain level of respect.

I'm not sure how religious you must be to become hysterical that a dead finger was placed on a phone to help solve a crime.

It's just another case of rich versus poor, famous versus nobody.

Imagine if that dead man was Steve Jobs or Prince or the CEO of some big bank, what policeman would dare to attempt such a thing.

It is also quite a dangerous precedent, considering he was killed by the police.

Agree with all of that except the last sentence, some Eastern religions believe the death ceremony of cremation and it's associated ceremonies are required to help the individuals soul move onto its next body and not be trapped

I feel the funeral home ought to have said "no" pretty quickly and plainly here. There was no warrant, the funeral home is private property and the cops were there explicitly to try to get evidence from a corpse.

I'm sure it is quite important for the police to do their job, but the funeral home is hired by the family and should, within reason, do only what the family says should be done with the body.

Let the police get a warrant if it's so important.

They stated early in the article that a warrant is not needed because "there's no expectation of privacy for the dead."

I strongly disagree with this, since it's not just the privacy of the owner locked away on a phone, but also the privacy of the people they have interacted with. It takes at least two to make a conversation, and suddenly if one dies then the other's messages are available for collection without a warrant?

Courts have ordered evidence to be collected from the personal devices of the living (with no concern about information pertaining 3rd-parties that may or may not be stored on those -- how would they know?). I don't see how the dead have extra rights in this situation.

The police should have gotten a warrant, just like in any other situation.

They argue that the dead have less rights... hence the reason they did not obtain a warrant.

I think the officers involved should be fired. This is clearly an attempt to justify the killing.

> While Chaney said detectives didn’t think they’d need a warrant because there is no expectation of privacy after death — an opinion several legal experts affirmed — the actions didn’t sit right with Phillip’s family.

I disagree with these legal experts. I hope Facebook and Grindr publish all the private information of these officers and legal "experts" when they die and refuse to take them down because they have a perpetual license anyway.

We have onerous life + xx years of copyright but the dead have no right of privacy?

The State's right to do whatever they want to a corpse certainly ends once they no longer have possession of the corpse.

More importantly, what the police did here was execute a search upon the funeral home. That their purpose was to temporarily seize a corpse shouldn't be any different than if they were looking for documents.

Society has long treated human bodies very differently than mere documents.

Which makes it all the more disconcerting that they would appear to have less legal protections, at least in this case.

"there's no expectation of privacy for the dead." presumes the corpse is a person with personal privacy. I choose to interpret it differently: the corpse is property of the family, albeit property with a few additional rights and rules, and property that has been entrusted with the funeral home.

The funeral home would have been well within their rights to say "get off my property and come back with a warrant". I would even go as far as to say they had an obligation to do so.

Important detail from the article: It didn't work.

I found this interesting too. Does anyone know a reason why it didn't work?

Wrong finger perhaps? Held at a wrong angle, getting a different part of the fingerprint? Dehydration affecting the capacitance of the body when scanned?

You can't unlock an iPhone with a fingerprint more than eight hours after the last unlock.

of course they did. why is this news?

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