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