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Car Subscription Features Raise Your Risk of Government Surveillance, Police Records Show
Records reviewed by WIRED show law enforcement agencies are eager to take advantage of the data trails generated by a flood of new internet-connected vehicle features.
While the Supreme Court specifically avoided addressing tower dumps in its landmark US v. Carpenter decision, a Fifth Circuit ruling last year placed the capability in great jeopardy, concluding that a warrant to “geofence” an area and collect evidence from a wide variety of individuals is inherently unconstitutional. While a “tower dump” and a “geofence” are not precisely the same—the latter relying on GPS coordinates obtained from internet companies such as Google, as opposed to a cell tower—the results are more or less identical: offering police a dragnet with which to accumulate vast amounts of location data on individuals, many if not most of whom are not suspected of committing a crime. Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union, notes that the police documents reviewed by WIRED contained substantial detail about car surveillance that appear to be publicly unavailable, suggesting that corporations are being far more open with law enforcement than they are with their own customers.
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