Fitbit Murder: Fitness Data INDICATE Culprit And Concerns About “Fit Leaks”
Karen Navarra, 67, passed away only in her dining room in San Jose, California, the victim of a bad grisly homicide. There have been no witnesses, but there is a single type of evidence that new reports say helped the authorities department capture her killer. As she died, her FitBit fitness tracker documented the precise time of her heart’s panicked, final beats, narrowing down their search to the only person who might have been with her when she finally flatlined. Fitness data, tracked constantly on our wrists and in our storage compartments and extracted from private databases by police warrant, have become an important part of solving crimes in simply a few years.
As the San Jose murder shows, “fit leaking,” as University of Toronto older researcher John Scott-Railton phone calls it, has an unprecedentedly intimate windows into the aspects of human being behavior we long assumed were private. That’s useful in a murder case, Scott-Railton cautions Inverse but there’s so much more it can reveal to whoever it it that can access it.
Currently, it takes a police warrant to access user data stored on the servers of fitness tracking companies. Following the San Jose Police Department did so, the September 25 arrest of Anthony Aiello it led to, Navarro’s 90-year-old stepfather, for murdering his stepdaughter. The New York Times reported that Navarro’s dining area was spattered with blood, and Navarro herself was found slumped at her dining room table with “lacerations on her behalf mind and neck” and a sizable kitchen blade in her right hand.
While this is a cool success for Fitbit as a crime-fighting tool, Scott-Railton can’t help but ask: How many other information regarding our private lives can fitness data reveal? Navarra’s loss of life is isn’t the first murder case to be resolved thanks to a wearable, and it shall not be the last.
In April 2017, a FitBit was used to charge Richard Debate with murdering his wife after his version of events didn’t line up with the motion recognized on his wife’s device. April This, a case in Australia used Apple Watch heartrate data to slim in on the exact seven minutes in which a woman fought for her life and then lost consciousness. The data are useful for solving offenses because it reveals how humans act in all sorts of circumstances, from the mundane to the morbid, Scott-Railton says.
- It doesn’t have a social community of users
- 3 Kim Kardashian
- 06-10-2012, 08:02 AM #7 (permalink)
- Extreme Weight Loss
- 8 Exercise programs
- 9 years ago from Mumbai
- 6010 Richmond Ave
“So with every successful analysis that is conducted with Fitbit data, what it also shows that data is generating a revealing transcript of human behavior extremely,” he says. “This data is going to be used increasingly more, and then the question becomes the type of oversight will that use have?
Deciding that has oversight of personal location data – only part of just what a fitness tracker has access to – has always been controversial. For example in the early 2000s, cellphone information could reveal when a person was resting about their whereabouts. Some contentious court cases culminated in a Supreme Court decision reasserting that police need a warrant to acquire those records. It was a protective coating of privacy in the wake of previous decisions in area courts that allowed police to gain access to this data without one. Everything controversy was concentrated only on data on location.
But a fitness tracker knows a lot more than that: It understands how healthy you are. As such, Scott-Railton cautions, there could be other entities outside of law enforcement that might want – and very well gets – access to this seductive transcript of human behavior. “It’s not limited to police researchers, it’s that they can ask for that data,” Scott-Railton says. Can You Misuse Tracker Data?
