Cops in [Spain] think everyone using a Google Pixel must be a drug dealer | Hacker News Reader

Cops in [Spain] think everyone using a Google Pixel must be a drug dealer

androidauthority.com

98 pointszczc68 comments

There's an opinion that it's part of coordinated campaign, not just slow news day.

https://grapheneos.social/@GrapheneOS/114784469162979608 thread lists same activity in Swedish-speaking parts of the internet.

If they're wearing a Casio F91W, then they're a terrorist AND a drug dealer!

Many years ago: https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-13194733

For Gen-Zers, that's the watch everyone's dad and older millenials used to wear everywhere in the world.

'90 kid here. I have one on my wrist 90% if the time. Cheap, practical, and if I crash on my MTB or scratch it up while I'm gardening, it's no big deal.

we found him

I've seen a lot of young people wearing the silver and gold versions of it. I think there's a vintage trend, just like with the cyber shot cameras, but they're not really full committed to the black rubber ones.

my 11 year old daughter has one too. And she asked for it.

I think that was because of Shakira's song against her ex.

  I'm worth two 22-year-olds

  You traded in a Ferrari for a Twingo

  You traded in a Rolex for a Casio

if anything your daughter should wear a Rolex?

Well it depends which side she took. I didn't really asked for a reasonning but if that new girlfriend is the reason her ex dumped her, that mean she is not that bad and a Casio may not be that inferior to a Rolex (which would anyway have led to a straight no had she asked for it). After all, a Casio F-91W is more reliable than a Rolex to give time and has other features such as an alarm clock.

I think Casio in some latin countries played with it as meme on twitter at the time.

I also think a Twingo is overall a much better car than any Ferrari for daily and lawful use.

I guess that's a question of whether you like the musician or the music. In the arc of the song, the boyfriend clearly developed good taste.

I have one as part of my Melbourne rave outfit.

One random cop makes one ignorant statement and now all "cops in Spain" think something.

> “Every time we see a Google Pixel, we suspect it might belong to a drug dealer,” said a police official leading the anti-drug operation in Catalonia

Not a random cop, but the leader of an entire operation.

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.”

You do understand that he speaks for a number of cops at once, not just himself, right?

Sometimes 400 officers: https://www.catalannews.com/society-science/item/drug-arms-t...

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..

I've seen news shows at my grandparents that talked about the rage of the masses while quoting three tweets for hours.

I've seen so many YouTuber's doing this too. They'll make a 30 minute video showing a few low comment reddit threads and some upset tweets.

When a Twitch streamer goes off on a rant because of a comment one person left its called getting “one guy’d”

the police in spain act like anybody using cloudflare is pirating something, so it kinda checks out

s,police,laliga,g

Isn't it the justice system enforcing La Liga's bullshit? I don't think the police is involved in this.

ClodFlare does not want to comply with court rulings. Not in Spain, nor in France.

Which court rulings in Spain Cloudflare doesn't want to comply with?

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.

Cloudflare does not provide the information to the court about the clients that do piracy.

Do they have to, especially if they're not from Spain?

If they want to operate in Spain, yes.

I'm not familiar with Spanish law, but you can see the problem with forcing a company to provide details of customers that are from a different country.

It's a bit like the UK demanding that Apple gave them access to user data of all customers worldwide. Apple correctly told them no and stopped offering end-to-end encryption to UK users.

So, following your example, CloudFlare should stop offering the service to Spanish clients that allow them to break the law.

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."

It would be if they did that, and maybe they do, but the article doesn't say they do that. You've added your own assumption.

Of course they do. What else do you think they're going to do? Keep their "suspicions" to themselves?

> Every time we see a Google Pixel, we suspect it might belong to a drug dealer

This means something, you know.

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.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sealioning

In other words, drug dealers are privacy-conscious and the Google Pixel is one of the strongest hardware platforms for privacy-aware configurations.

> GrapheneOS boasts particularly secure and well-executed full disk and metadata encryption, a security feature

So, the default iPhone experience?

GrapheneOS goes much, much further than that, providing stronger sandboxes for apps and Google Play Services. GrapheneOS also allows multiple users, isolating things like your filesystem and camera roll from groups of apps.

You can do things like install and update apps in one profile with stronger permissions, and then actually operate the apps in another profile that's locked-down. You can also do things like install apps that require Google Play Services in one profile, but then run them in another with no Google Play Services. In practice, you can have a phone that never phone homes to Google while still running apps that depend on Google Play Services. If you're really savvy, you can even protect your identity from google entirely, using anonymous accounts for the Play Store. You can even get RCS up and running with no Google Services running or Carrier apps running.

As far as I know, you can't turn off phoning home to Apple on iOS. Nor do you know what, exactly, is being phoned home.

Yeah I would have guessed it was more the easy availability of cheap android burner phones than Google Pixel specifically.

Maybe they can also sideload custom apps that would never pass App Store review?

Being in Europe, I think that's not an issue for iOS anymore.

They can use alternative AppStore’s now, but that isn’t sideloading. It still is a centralized place to track/attack/control what I can do. Which would be a problem for someone doing something illegal in that same jurisdiction.

Also, if I was doing something illegal, the other controls Apple has over iOS would make me reconsider using it, even with the ‘other AppStores’.

At least if I’m flashing my own OS, and installing things directly and locally, I can think I’m bypassing most factory level spyware and without centralized monitoring. In theory at least.

This "Almost Friday" skit about the Google Pixel is comedy gold...

https://youtu.be/faabxveeoZo

The primary source seems to be https://en.ara.cat/society/technological-warfare-the-drug-tr... (autotranslated from Catalan)

Both the translation and the original news are like one paragraph long with 0 context or source.

It’s also quite ridiculous, I’m from Madrid and pixels seem to be the phone of choice for most of my (non tech) friends.

Pixels used to be quite unknown, as most people go for budget Chinese brands, now they’re getting popular. “Get an iPhone-level camera for 300 bucks” is a massive selling point.

Latest Pixels are nearly 1k EUR though. Slightly too expensive but still a top pick for me.

Latest highest end model. The "a" model are more in the 550€ area and still have super decent camera, especially if you aren't a selphie addict.

Being the models with the longest firmware support, it is not uncommon for people to buy them second hand at around 300€. I bought my Pixel 6a last year for around 200€.

Ara is a pro-secessionist diary so take their news about the national police in Spain with a pinch of salt.

That’s the Mossos, not the national police of Spain.

Then the title is wrong and should mention that “A Catalan policeman says that…”.

Mossos aren't policemen.

Yeah they are. Their official name is literally "Policia de la Generalitat de Catalunya".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mossos_d%27Esquadra

Mossos are the Police of Catalonia modulo borders, counterterrorism and higher duties which are dealt by the Guardia Civil (akin to Gendarmerie).

What are they then? It’s a regional police force.

They are mossos ;-)

The police in Spain can thank there lucky stars that they are not dealing with the drug gangs in Mexico and South America, where they are flying militerised drones, and are trying to build narco drone subs with starlink

https://maritime-executive.com/article/colombian-navy-captur...

They have been, at least a little. They've captured narco subs crossing the Atlantic, including to Spain specifically. The cartels must have trusted associates in Europe to receive these shipments, and that probably means violent enforcers of the cartels in Europe. With unmanned narco subs making longer voyages simpler, this is likely to become an even bigger problem.

They've actually caught one of those subs being built in Spain! https://www.europol.europa.eu/media-press/newsroom/news/span...

Spain is one of the biggest gateways of drugs into Europe (if not the biggest one). They've been dealing with LATAM mafia for decades.

They tried, but the Europeans Mafias know that if the violence hits the fan and craps out civilians (non-gang related members), these would be crushed down in miliseconds.

The CNI is no joke and it has -ahem- nonstandard methods to deal with these scum. Spain has grown a huge counterterrorism wisdom over decades.

Or a GrapheneOS user ...

Now we just need every other citizen to understand the benefits of GrapheneOS. Glad to see some people are catching up.

We also need a better boot screen experience.

Sounds like an astroturfing stunt from either Google or GrapheneOS

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