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Comment by ticmasta | Hacker News Reader

I'm pretty confident that

(A) the police can't barge into a private residence because some tech company points at a phone and says "see! it says my scooter is inside!" - they would still need legal basis for probable cause. When my home was B&E'd and a tablet stolen the police said unless the device reported it was in a public area they explicitly were "not going to go into a private residence to look for it".

(B) The police should (and probably will) place these complaints at the very bottom of their priority list.

(C) No current-era start-up that's business model is based around ignoring regulation and existing laws is going to assume responsibility and cost for anything they can displace onto another party or, better yet, society at large 'cause, ya know "disruption".

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Wow -- that seems really odd; a GPS beacon seems like it is practically the definition of probable cause. I can understand police being reluctant to pursue crimes where the criminal is unlikely to be apprehended, but in this case it seems a straightforward way of boosting arrest numbers since the crime is so clear-cut.

Regulation and crimes are different things. Regulations are aimed at preemptively preventing potential crimes, usually fraud, by making parties affirmatively establish that they do not have criminal intent before committing an act.

Crimes are criminal acts -- we added an equal protection clause to the constitution to prevent exactly this scenario, where the police can discriminate on the application of the law. If the police are choosing to deny the protection of the law to a company like Bird then they are liable for a civil suit, in addition to violating their duties as law enforcement officers.

Except when it's not; see below.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2016/01/26...

https://electronics.howstuffworks.com/cell-phone-apps/when-f...

I am not a lawyer but I don't believe that probable cause requires there to be no false positives.

Heck, “beyond a reasonable doubt” doesn't require no false positives, and “probable cause” is a much lower standard (not as low as “reasonable suspicion”, though.)

Even if it was worth their time, they would need a warrant. That takes time and resources that would be better spent elsewhere.

As far as police choosing to deny service: police will always give theft low priority. If the theft is of random items that you’ve left scattered around blocking walkways (in many cases in violation of local ordinances and littering restrictions), then That’s probably going to be way further down the list of their priorities.

Wow -- that seems really odd; a GPS beacon seems like it is practically the definition of probable cause.

My anecdote: I was assaulted and had my iPhone taken from me. The police were called, and I had the location pinpointed right in the bedroom of the assailant on "Find my iPhone" on my iPad. No search warrant was issued by the judge, because the judge couldn't understand the information. (Which was being relayed to the judge by the police over the phone.)

> When my home was B&E'd and a tablet stolen the police said unless the device reported it was in a public area they explicitly were "not going to go into a private residence to look for it".

That's not because they can't, that's because it would take getting a warrant and your case wasn't important enough to them to justify that even if they had probable cause to take to a judge. (Which GPS location probably would be, with a full explanation including the monitoring services own description of it's operating methids.)

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