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Location, location, location for police
New tracking technology is making police work more efficient, even as it creates gray areas in the legal code, experts say.
“This is the wild, wild west,” said Tom Nolan, an associate professor of criminal justice at Boston University and a 27-year veteran of the Boston Police Department. “Legislative bodies and courts are years away from being able to establish any body of law to deal with this.”
Nolan and other experts expressed concern amid a furor over research revealing that what Nolan refers to as “too-smart phones” — such as the Apple iPhone and the Motorola Droid — store user location data.
Such data has long been a boon to cops, who routinely petition cell phone companies for access to customer information.
In Burlington, mapping technology allowed police to predict the next time and location in a string of home burglaries with almost 70 percent accuracy, said Glen A. Mills, president of the Massachusetts Association of Crime Analysts.
“In the past, we would have flooded the area for weeks at a time, and it would have cost massive amounts of money,” Mills, a lieutenant in the Burlington Police Department, said. “Now we can make predictions on the dates and time when crime is more likely to happen.”
But civil liberties experts warned of a dark side.
“Our phone carries so much data about us — where you go, what you do, who you know,” Massachusetts ACLU privacy rights coordinator Kady Crockman said. “The exposure of this really private information could lead to all sorts of privacy nightmares.”
Article URL: http://www.bostonherald.com/news/regional/view.bg?articleid=1332709
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