Speaker 1: The fact that your location is probably being recorded very
Speaker 1: regularly at a regular interval. That's kind of a scary thing.
Speaker 1: That's THEO pat. He's a nineteen year old freshman at
Speaker 1: Stanford University. I tracked him down at the Stanford Student
Speaker 1: Union on a Sunday Friday afternoon in October, a few
Speaker 1: weeks after he started as a computer science underground. Hey
Speaker 1: is that there? How are you all right? Here? We are?
Speaker 1: He's a skinny, friendly kid with a nervous smile, bright eyes,
Speaker 1: and pale skin. And when he was fifteen he created
Speaker 1: a software program that I recently got interested in. The
Speaker 1: type of program THEO created, It's called a visualizer. It
Speaker 1: lets you upload your location data from Google. Then the
Speaker 1: program lays that information over a map, so you can
Speaker 1: see everywhere you've been in minute detail. THEO said. The
Speaker 1: idea first came to him in a geography class where
Speaker 1: we were talking a lot about kind of people and
Speaker 1: migration patterns and where they go. And I guess that
Speaker 1: coupled with somehow stumbling upon an article about Google take
Speaker 1: out and how Google is recording his data about you
Speaker 1: kind of put teer and two together and wanted to
Speaker 1: look at myself then my kind of microcosm of migration patterns.
Speaker 1: Google is constantly collecting incredibly detailed information on our movements,
Speaker 1: and Google take Out, which THEO just mentioned, is an
Speaker 1: easy way to download your information from Google. THEO already
Speaker 1: knew how to code. He thought it would be cool
Speaker 1: to see his own movements displayed on a map. Initially,
Speaker 1: THEO put a basic program online and hundreds of thousands
Speaker 1: of people tried it out. He soon made a pro version,
Speaker 1: which has been used often in ways THEO never intended.
Speaker 1: Jealous lovers, snooping on their partner's whereabouts, employers tracking their staff,
Speaker 1: even police and government agencies have taken an interest. M Hi,
Speaker 1: I'm pr God Cary and I'm Alista bar And this
Speaker 1: week on Decrypted, we're exploring the unintended consequences of the
Speaker 1: systems that monitor our own location data. As a society,
Speaker 1: we've consented to creating a detailed record of our every
Speaker 1: step and entrusted it to Google, a private company. Fear
Speaker 1: thought his maps would help people create digital keepsakes of
Speaker 1: fond memories and records for traveling business people. But our
Speaker 1: location data is more powerful than many of us realize,
Speaker 1: and it can be used in surprising ways. We'll hear
Speaker 1: from one father who tried to use Theo's map tool
Speaker 1: to prove his daughter's innocence after she was charged with
Speaker 1: a string of burglaries, but it didn't turn out. Well.
Speaker 1: Stay with us, so, Ali, let's get back to the
Speaker 1: day when you and THEO met at Stanford. Well, we
Speaker 1: found a conference room where we sat down to chat
Speaker 1: to school table. That's right, of course, fully checked out.
Speaker 1: So I think this is this building is like head headquarters.
Speaker 1: And THEO told me how it all began. He grew
Speaker 1: up in Memphis, Tennessee, and even though he dislikes the term,
Speaker 1: he's a digital native, born in the Internet era and
Speaker 1: embedded in tech most of his waking hours. Like a
Speaker 1: lot of kids, THEO got into software coding by building websites.
Speaker 1: I made my dad website, I mean myself a website.
Speaker 1: I made my friends a website. I was making a
Speaker 1: lot of websites back in elementary school. Then he worked
Speaker 1: on Wikipedia, helping create software that spots people making stuff
Speaker 1: up and correcting it. His talents were spotted by the
Speaker 1: local Memphis TV station c W thirty News. I'm going back.
Speaker 1: We count on apps are just about everything, banking, communicating,
Speaker 1: waking us up in the morning, and we learned it
Speaker 1: takes a lot of cold Yeah, that's going fer a
Speaker 1: language for you know, get those programs to function the
Speaker 1: way that they should. And White Station highs THEO pat
Speaker 1: Our local cool kid knows all about it because he's
Speaker 1: creating several apps, even helping lawyers build their cases. Here. CW.
Speaker 1: Thirtis acre. Then THEO had his mapping idea in that
Speaker 1: geography class. He'd heard of Google Takeout. That's the service
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier, which lets people download their information. It
Speaker 1: was developed by the Data Liberation Front. That's the playful
Speaker 1: name of a group of engineers whose job is to
Speaker 1: give users access to their Google data and let them
Speaker 1: use it anyway they want. We are the Data Liberation Front.
Speaker 1: We've been working hard for the past four years to
Speaker 1: make it easy for you to take your data out
Speaker 1: of Google's products. This is a video the Data Liberation
Speaker 1: Team released in twenty eleven when Google Takeout became available.
Speaker 1: The team is dressed in a guerrilla style uniform and
Speaker 1: one guy at the front is holding a cardboard takeout
Speaker 1: box like the kind you get from Chinese restaurants. And
Speaker 1: he's pulling things out like a floppy disk, a cassette,
Speaker 1: a school of film. It's a great idea, but in
Speaker 1: practice the data you can download isn't much used to
Speaker 1: regular people. The location history is a file with a
Speaker 1: bunch of numbers and letters representing things like latitude and longitude.
Speaker 1: So THEO built another website. This one lets people take
Speaker 1: those incomprehensible files from Google and upload them. Video software
Speaker 1: passes the numbers and letters and up pops a heat
Speaker 1: map showing where you hang out regularly. When I met
Speaker 1: THEO at Stamford, he fired up the pro version of
Speaker 1: his tool to show me the awesome power of this
Speaker 1: data in a very personal way. All right, so I'll do.
Speaker 1: Let's pull up your I, punch in my password, and
Speaker 1: THEO guides me to the download section of my Google
Speaker 1: account online. So we've got a turn of options here,
Speaker 1: but all we want Google play Store. There were fifty
Speaker 1: three different data sets in there. About two thirds of
Speaker 1: the way down was my location in history. We click that,
Speaker 1: picked the file format, and pressed download. After a while
Speaker 1: we had the file, so we've just got lag launch
Speaker 1: times now. They also kind of predict the activities that
Speaker 1: you're doing at certain time intervals. But so that just
Speaker 1: kind of goes on and there's just a lad of
Speaker 1: data here. The real magic happened when THEO uploaded that
Speaker 1: file into his software visualizer. The free version is on
Speaker 1: a website called Location History Visualizer dot com slash heat map.
Speaker 1: It's also one of the first results if you do
Speaker 1: a Google search for something like Location History Visualizer. THEO
Speaker 1: uploaded my data and a digital map appeared covered in
Speaker 1: blue dots on Thursday. So there's a snake that goes
Speaker 1: up from sand Cars where I live, just south of SATRSISC,
Speaker 1: and it's snakes north. I know exactly what I'm seeing
Speaker 1: that I was walking to my dinner appointment. Ali. Where
Speaker 1: any secrets revealed when you saw your data in front
Speaker 1: of you, Well, the data included one day a week
Speaker 1: when I work from home and sank I lost. I
Speaker 1: know what that was, Okay, so it has me a
Speaker 1: little further south. That is me um picking up my laundry. Okay, sorry, boss,
Speaker 1: I picked up my laundry for a few minutes. And
Speaker 1: I also actually you know what that is. Also, I
Speaker 1: met a source for lunch. That's good for a story
Speaker 1: coming out of this Wednesday after work, I mean the
Speaker 1: next town over all, and then we've gone up We've
Speaker 1: gone up here into Redwood City. That's amazing. Just for
Speaker 1: one day, there were hundreds of data points, and this
Speaker 1: is just a tiny slice of the information available to you.
Speaker 1: It was just one of fifty three items in that
Speaker 1: Google take out list. Looking at the dots conjured emotions.
Speaker 1: Immediately joy remembering my friends at movie night. Slight guilt,
Speaker 1: we're calling that I nipped out to get the laundry
Speaker 1: when I should have been at my desk working at home.
Speaker 1: THEO had a similar strong reaction when he saw years
Speaker 1: of his own activity plotted in excruciating detail in front
Speaker 1: of him for the first time. I mean, it was
Speaker 1: just magical, right. I knew it was going on because
Speaker 1: I had read that Google tracks your location data, and
Speaker 1: I had the file, and I looked inside the file
Speaker 1: and saw a list of latitude and longitude points. But
Speaker 1: I think seeing that on a map in a very
Speaker 1: concrete way, like oh, this is my physical existence navigating
Speaker 1: through the world for a long period of time, that
Speaker 1: was the kind of light bult like, wow, this is
Speaker 1: this is a big chunk of who I am. When
Speaker 1: he launched the visualizer online. He expected pretty innocent use cases.
Speaker 1: I mean he was just a teenager, right right, But
Speaker 1: once people started using the visualizer for their own purposes,
Speaker 1: theo realized they had all sorts of use cases in
Speaker 1: mind that he had never thought about. Fast wortword. About
Speaker 1: a year, guy got in touch with me and was
Speaker 1: looking to perform a more detailed sort of visualization. Right,
Speaker 1: so you've got the heat map, can't I see the
Speaker 1: individual points that were contributing to this heat map? And uh?
Speaker 1: And I said, sure. That guy was Bill Carrica, the
Speaker 1: father who wanted to used Google location data to save
Speaker 1: his daughter Katie from prison. Fee you help Bill, and
Speaker 1: made the more detailed map he was asking for. It
Speaker 1: became the pro version of his program, and it offers
Speaker 1: a very precise kind of visualization, often minute by minute.
Speaker 1: And the initial reason behind it was for use in
Speaker 1: kind of a legal case and demonstrating that someone was
Speaker 1: not at a particular location. But it's since spiraled into
Speaker 1: answer to different uses that I could have thought of. Initially,
Speaker 1: that was the impetus for all of this. Bill Carrico
Speaker 1: believed that his daughter's Google data would convincingly show that
Speaker 1: she was nowhere near the places where the crimes she
Speaker 1: was accused of were committed. What the data revealed and
Speaker 1: what happened to Katie, that's coming up. So theo's visualizer software,
Speaker 1: something he'd created as a fifteen year old in response
Speaker 1: to his own curiosity, was out there in the world.
Speaker 1: But once he launched the pro tool, THEO started seeing
Speaker 1: all the more sinister ways this data can be used.
Speaker 1: The ones that I definitely have the most correspondence with
Speaker 1: our spouses who are very suspicious of their partners for
Speaker 1: for whatever reason, and want to have a closer look
Speaker 1: at where they were. So these people are somehow breaking
Speaker 1: into their partner's Google accounts to get hold of this data,
Speaker 1: that's right. And the strangest thing is that they really
Speaker 1: want to talk to THEO, not just about how the
Speaker 1: software works, but about their own predicaments. I mean what
Speaker 1: type of things they say, like just really genuine kind
Speaker 1: of please for help. Right, So, do you feel like
Speaker 1: they're so they chat with you because they need help
Speaker 1: with some technical aspect of it. But then but then
Speaker 1: do you feel like they're they like they want to
Speaker 1: tell you about the situation? Almost? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, I
Speaker 1: think I think they desperately want to tell someone, right,
Speaker 1: and UH, and this little chat box on the system
Speaker 1: that's this magic box, right, that's providing this. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's like a god right to them because they don't
Speaker 1: they don't know that their phone has been recording this.
Speaker 1: And then maybe they've they've looked up like how can
Speaker 1: I tell where someone was? Like they made a Google
Speaker 1: search and somehow, step by step has led them to this.
Speaker 1: Then there are the use cases that THEO really can't
Speaker 1: talk about. Police and government agencies investigating people by subpoena
Speaker 1: in their Google data and digging through it. The kind
Speaker 1: of application by different sorts of government entities to UH
Speaker 1: to very particularly track individuals whom they had interested in
Speaker 1: for different reasons is UH is definitely a major major
Speaker 1: use of the tool of this location. Didn't think. I
Speaker 1: guess if I had sat down and thought about it,
Speaker 1: I would have. But that wasn't That wasn't really the
Speaker 1: mindset that I went into it with. Right, It was
Speaker 1: very UH, egalitarian happiness, everyone's all good. But how old
Speaker 1: you a time I was? I was fifteen, Yeah, that
Speaker 1: was like a good world you for fifteen year old.
Speaker 1: I think I didn't need to have all that baggage.
Speaker 1: When I posted in for more details on these investigations,
Speaker 1: THEA shared a few general details enough to give a
Speaker 1: sense of the awesome power of this information. If they
Speaker 1: have that enterprise version, then they might they might never
Speaker 1: cool you, or they might if they need help. Was right. Yeah.
Speaker 1: So one of the things that the enterprise version does
Speaker 1: is has various integrations with different sorts of data that
Speaker 1: you might want to overlay on your on the location
Speaker 1: street file you have. So let's say you have acquired
Speaker 1: UH cell tower records for an individual, and that can
Speaker 1: be UH in all sorts of different forms. One of
Speaker 1: the most common is like a PDF from a T
Speaker 1: and T or whoever, that is monotype information. So we've
Speaker 1: created kind of parsers for that sort of information where
Speaker 1: you can then ingest the location nestory file and the
Speaker 1: cell tower data and then cross reference that. So you've
Speaker 1: gotten now two points that indicate two pieces of information
Speaker 1: that indicate it's likely that someone was at a particular
Speaker 1: place for corroborating right or call and text records right,
Speaker 1: So plotting the locations that they were at when they
Speaker 1: sent particular messages or received particular phone calls. This was
Speaker 1: the type of capability. Bill Carrico was looking to tap
Speaker 1: his daughter, a consignment store owner called Katie Carrico. Hyatt
Speaker 1: was arrested in two thousand and fourteen on multiple charges
Speaker 1: related to burglary and receiving stolen goods in Virginia. S
Speaker 1: Deputy Commwell's attorney, Chuck Family so As police were covered
Speaker 1: four hundred and fifteen items from high It's home, vehicle,
Speaker 1: and shop. He says, Hi, it's motive being broke. He says,
Speaker 1: text message records show marital strain between high and her
Speaker 1: husband due to financial problems. Bill gathered Katie's Google location
Speaker 1: history with the goal of helping her get acquitted. When
Speaker 1: they location history was discovered by Katie, she had just
Speaker 1: been arrested. She was announced arrest and she was trying
Speaker 1: to figure out where these houses were that they accused
Speaker 1: her of burgerizing, and she's never even heard of some
Speaker 1: of the streets. Another thing, and so she realized that
Speaker 1: Google had location histories are and so I went looking
Speaker 1: for somebody and wanted to take that location data and
Speaker 1: put it in a very specific format. And that's when
Speaker 1: I found a young man who had a a tool,
Speaker 1: and I found another guy in Bulgaria, and I talked
Speaker 1: to both of them and I went with the fella
Speaker 1: with the theyll asked THEO to plot it in detail,
Speaker 1: hoping to prove she wasn't at some of the locations
Speaker 1: where the police said she was. But there was a problem.
Speaker 1: According to Katie's lawyer, j Lloyd Snook, he didn't want
Speaker 1: to be recorded, but he said in a phone interview
Speaker 1: that the Google location data in some cases showed exactly
Speaker 1: what the prosecution claimed, so Snook decided against submitting it
Speaker 1: as evidence. Thea wouldn't talk about the details of the case,
Speaker 1: but he did say this, it goes both ways, right,
Speaker 1: your location. Sometimes it's beneficial to a story you're trying
Speaker 1: to create, and sometimes it's not beneficial to a story
Speaker 1: you're trying to create. And I think once you open
Speaker 1: that can of words worms, right, once it's submitted for
Speaker 1: discovery and everything like that, it's it is now part
Speaker 1: of you. It's part of your record that you're presenting,
Speaker 1: and you can't just turn it off. You can't just
Speaker 1: say no, never, never mind, let's let's not look at
Speaker 1: this anymore. Katie ended up pleading guilty to grand larceny
Speaker 1: and breaking and entering, and is currently imprisoned, serving a
Speaker 1: sentence of about twenty years. Her father says she's innocent
Speaker 1: and that the prosecution made mistakes. He's also upset with
Speaker 1: her lawyer for not doing enough to help her. Bill
Speaker 1: has been studying all the case files and he's even
Speaker 1: written to the Governor of Virginia to request to pardon,
Speaker 1: and he's still hoping. He used Katie's Google location history
Speaker 1: to prove her innocence. He says that the police misreported
Speaker 1: the date of one incident, and on that real dating question,
Speaker 1: the data show Katie wasn't there. And then she said,
Speaker 1: I saw two women in a car in the driveway,
Speaker 1: and I can use the location to all the show
Speaker 1: Katie at home on the phone text messaging that entire morning,
Speaker 1: and it was a morning fighting and we showed Katie's
Speaker 1: on the phone in her residence on that morning where
Speaker 1: she couldn't possibly fit been the burger, and that breaks
Speaker 1: their case wide open. I emailed the prosecutor Let's fleet
Speaker 1: about this. He went back, calling the cases rock solid
Speaker 1: and citing eyewitnesses and video footage putting Katie at the
Speaker 1: scene of the alleged crimes. Bill seems torn about the
Speaker 1: amount of data available to both sides in his daughter's case. Well,
Speaker 1: the if you have people who are out to paying
Speaker 1: a picture, you can you can interpret data, if you
Speaker 1: can assign motives to people, interpret things anyway you want.
Speaker 1: Most of the wrongful convictions are where people at a
Speaker 1: wrong place at the wrong time. I think that there's
Speaker 1: a lot of downside having so much information, But if
Speaker 1: you're an innocent person like Katie, this is absolutely um.
Speaker 1: The only reason that we are where we are is
Speaker 1: because that data existed, and we hope to be able
Speaker 1: to use it to to prove her innocence. Ali, is
Speaker 1: it unusual to have Google data show up in investigations
Speaker 1: like this? Yeah, that's a good question. I wondered how
Speaker 1: widespread this is. After talking with THEO and Bill So,
Speaker 1: I called Jerome Greco. He's a digital forensics attorney at
Speaker 1: the Legal Aid Society in New York. Two things law
Speaker 1: enforce and one is doing a lot more than the
Speaker 1: than they're publicly revealing, even on criminal cases. And too,
Speaker 1: I think that they're going to just continually continue to
Speaker 1: get more and more advanced and use these things more
Speaker 1: and more. He had a powerful analogy to comparing traditional
Speaker 1: police warrants to search your house with modern requests to
Speaker 1: probe the contents of your smartphone and online accounts. If
Speaker 1: I had a choice between somebody searching my home and
Speaker 1: somebody searching my phone, I would choose my home every
Speaker 1: single time. Uh. And again, I'm not somebody who who
Speaker 1: has something illegal that I'm concerned about. But there's a
Speaker 1: lot more private and personal information on my phone than
Speaker 1: there is in my house, in my apartment, the police
Speaker 1: can access your Google data if they can persuade a judge.
Speaker 1: There's a good reason other government agencies go through similar steps.
Speaker 1: If they get the okay, the company has to comply.
Speaker 1: Back at Stanford, THEO was reluctant to discuss Katie's case,
Speaker 1: but the episode is another source of mixed feelings about
Speaker 1: the data that his creation has revealed. So well, I
Speaker 1: think at least once once people realize that this is
Speaker 1: a reality that we've kind of accidentally stumbled into. Right,
Speaker 1: there was never any big, like public decision like let's
Speaker 1: do it, let's let's all record our locations at all
Speaker 1: times and give them to this private company and just
Speaker 1: let's just do it. Right. That was not That was
Speaker 1: not something that happened. Google Maps has just gotten smarter.
Speaker 1: We can when you're home, we'll we'll tell you you
Speaker 1: know how far it is to work. Right. That was
Speaker 1: how this was all presented, and I think the uh,
Speaker 1: the steps that kind of led to that were a
Speaker 1: lot murkier in a lot of people's minds. And it
Speaker 1: was like Google Maps is so great, man, it always
Speaker 1: tells me and how far my commute is to work?
Speaker 1: Like this is awesome, I know what to do, but
Speaker 1: but what's the cost of that? I think people right
Speaker 1: now broadly don't have an accurate sense of the cost,
Speaker 1: and so they can't really way the benefit against that.
Speaker 1: It just seems like all benefits, but in fact there
Speaker 1: are these costs and we need to kind of consider
Speaker 1: is this this is a cost we want to pay
Speaker 1: or what Google says it fights stay to equip us
Speaker 1: that are overly board. It's also important to point out
Speaker 1: that the specific location data product that we're talking about
Speaker 1: is something that you have to opt into. However, that's
Speaker 1: easy to do because Google often sends pop up questions
Speaker 1: when you're using its apps suggesting location data would make
Speaker 1: the service better, and their services are really useful, so
Speaker 1: most of the time we end up clicking yes. Do
Speaker 1: you feel any different about the location data or any
Speaker 1: other information on your phone? So I guess for me,
Speaker 1: I know it's there, I know I've opted into it.
Speaker 1: I know it will probably reveal things about me, and
Speaker 1: I neither want to delete it, nor do I want
Speaker 1: to look at it and see what it says. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think I think I'm pretty torn. I certainly feel
Speaker 1: seeing seeing that data put in front of me on
Speaker 1: on that map in so much detail. Uh, it really
Speaker 1: gives you a sense of you know, how people compere
Speaker 1: into your life. Actually, um, we didn't include this, but
Speaker 1: Jerome was saying that it's a good example would be
Speaker 1: something like, you know, if you go to church every
Speaker 1: Sunday and you go to a particular church, you know,
Speaker 1: they'd have the latitude and longitude of that, and you know,
Speaker 1: if people got hold of that that they you know,
Speaker 1: they'd be able to say, well, you're you're religious and
Speaker 1: you actually believe in this type of religion and maybe,
Speaker 1: you know, maybe you don't want people to everyone to
Speaker 1: know about that. And yet maybe there's a lag in
Speaker 1: civil society when it comes to learning about our data
Speaker 1: and what its value is. And all the different ways
Speaker 1: that it can be used, and inevitably there will be
Speaker 1: more ways that it can be used that we haven't
Speaker 1: even thought of yet. But as as we move forward
Speaker 1: in time and as we all become more savvy about
Speaker 1: what can be done with data, I'm sure there will
Speaker 1: be other use cases like the one that THEO created
Speaker 1: and many others. Yeah. Actually, THEO raised one final concern
Speaker 1: on that point of consent and opting in or opting out,
Speaker 1: and I hadn't really thought about it, but but I
Speaker 1: really can't shake it now that he's mentioned it. I
Speaker 1: think one of the biggest concerns is kind of not
Speaker 1: even now, right, but it's thinking ten years from now,
Speaker 1: twenty years from now, fifty years from now, this data
Speaker 1: still exists, right. The data that you create now is data,
Speaker 1: and it persists indefinitely, you know, two introduced from now.
Speaker 1: I don't know what what what's it being, what's it
Speaker 1: being used for? The delayed utility of this data that
Speaker 1: we're not aware of now. Maybe it's good and maybe
Speaker 1: it helps you or maybe it really hurts you, but
Speaker 1: you don't know. And has THEO ever shut off his
Speaker 1: own location data on Google? Yes, he admitted to flipping
Speaker 1: the switch for a couple of months once, but he
Speaker 1: was pretty cagy about it. It's kind of tough to
Speaker 1: talk about, right. It's I don't exactly know why I
Speaker 1: did it. Almost it was just I want maybe I
Speaker 1: don't want this because I just had passively opted in
Speaker 1: to it my entire life. Let me consciously opt out
Speaker 1: and and see what that's like, because it's a little
Speaker 1: unnerving thinking about it. And then ultimately I think I
Speaker 1: turned it back on because it was there was a
Speaker 1: little part of me right. And that's it for this
Speaker 1: week's episode of Decrypted. Thanks for listening. If you have
Speaker 1: a story about Google or Internet data, send us an
Speaker 1: email at decrypted at Bloomberg dot net, or you can
Speaker 1: reach out to us on Twitter. I'm an Alistair m
Speaker 1: bar and I'm at Pierre Gadkari. If you haven't already,
Speaker 1: please subscribe to our show wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: And while you're there, I hope you take a minute
Speaker 1: to leave us a rating and a review. It does
Speaker 1: so much to get us in front of new listeners.
Speaker 1: This episode was produced by Pierre get Cary, Liz Smith,
Speaker 1: and Magnus Hendrickson. Special thanks said brad Stone, aki Ito
Speaker 1: and Vander May, and Emily Busso. Francesco Leavi is head
Speaker 1: of Bloomberg Podcasts. We'll see you next. US plans