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Amazon Ring Doorbell Footage Shared With Police Without User Consent

Amazon was caught red-handed, handing over Ring doorbell footage to law enforcement agencies without user permission, subpoenas, warrants, without any of the traditional legal controls which prevent liberal disclosure of non-public data to law enforcement. This disclosure was set to further ignite ongoing debates about privacy and civil liberties in relation to the tech giant’s video-sharing agreements with police departments nationwide.

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Geofence Warrants and Google’s Huge Sensorvault Location Database Provide Law Enforcement with Lists of All People Near a Crime Scene

While in the news currently, geofence warrants (also referred to as ‘geo-fence warrants’) are nothing new (and our article includes a real example of a geofence warrant). We first wrote about geofence warrants and how Google is providing law enforcement agencies with lists of devices it has identified as being in the area of a crime scene at the time of the crime almost exactly 3 years ago to the day. Once serving the geofence warrant, and receiving the data from Google’s massive device location database called Sensorvault, law enforcement agencies can then create lists of possible suspects and witnesses, all based on their knowing that the person was simply in the area, based on the tracking of their device.

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Law Enforcement is Searching Ancestry.com and 23andMe DNA Databases

We’ve always said that submitting your DNA for DNA analysis at services like 23andMe, and AncestryDNA by Ancestry.com, is a bad idea, because regardless of what ‘good’ can come from it, the potential for bad is just too great. Having unknown actors have access to your DNA information is a violation of privacy of the most basic, and intimate, kind. Sadly, we were right. Law enforcement agencies are now using what is known as “familial DNA search” to go on DNA fishing expeditions, searching for near matches to DNA found at a crime scene.

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FBI, Feds Want to be Able to Decrypt Your Encrypted Email and Messages

Both the Federal Senate Judiciary Committee and the Senate Intelligence Committee heard today from FBI Director James Comey, and from Deputy Attorney General Sally Quillian Yates, that they need a backdoor (or a “front door”, as Comey calls it) that allows them to decrypt encrypted email and messages in order to fight terrorism.