A History of the Mug Shot

Al Capone mugshotSome of the very earliest photographs from the late 1830s are of alleged and/or convicted criminals, and law enforcement officials used photographs of criminals in Belgium as early as the 1840s to track down wrong-doers.  In Paris, a clerk in the Prefecture of Police Office originated the “mug shot” as we usually imagine it — two shots side by side, with one shot being a frontal shot and the other being a profile.

This so-called “Bertillon System” was displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and it quickly caught on with American urban police departments.  It was an age of science, and some thought of the mug shot as a useful component in “scientific law enforcement.”  Indeed, there are surviving efforts by police departments to superimpose photographs of certain types of criminals on top of one another.   We could then, theoretically, have distilled images of, to note only two of many possibilities, the typical pickpocket or typical forger.

In the present, mug shots are still with us, but we now live in an era in which the market rather than science is seen by many as our savior.  It is possible to round up mug shots from public records and post them regardless of whether the pictured individuals have been prosecuted and/or convicted. 

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What the Heck Is Drawbridge?

scaredy catYou won’t find out from this New York Times front-page story from yesterday, which is disappointingly long on alarmism but scarce on details, a phenomenon all too frequent in privacy reporting. In the third sentence — immediately after anthropomorphizing smartphones — the story tells us that “advertisers, and tech companies like Google and Facebook, are finding new, sophisticated ways to track people on their phones and reach them with individualized, hypertargeted ads.” Boy, that sounds bad — exactly what horrible new thing have they come up with now?

The third paragraph tells us only what privacy advocates fear. The fourth mentions the National Security Agency. The fifth quotes privacy scholar Jennifer King saying that consumers don’t understand ad tracking.

The sixth paragraph finally gives us a specific example of the “new, sophisticated ways” advertisers and tech companies are “track[ing] people on their phones”: Drawbridge. What does Drawbridge do? It’s “figured out how to follow people without cookies, and to determine that a cellphone, work computer, home computer and tablet belong to the same person, even if the devices are in no way connected.” But this doesn’t tell us much. There are more and less innocuous ways to accomplish the goal of tracking users across devices. On the innocent end of the scale, a website could make you sign into an account, which would allow it to tell who you are, no matter what computer you use. On the malevolent end of the scale, it could hack into your devices and access personal information that is then linked to your activity. The key question is, how is Drawbridge getting the data it is using to track users, and what is in that data?

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Google Calls in the Cavalry in the Street View Case

satellite-antennae-618125-mI do intend to get back to my four-part series on whether Google’s collection of information from residential Wi-Fi networks violated the Wiretap Act. That issue is being litigated in the Northern District of California in a consolidated class action of home wireless network users, and the earlier posts in my series examined the plaintiffs’, Google’s, and the district court’s arguments on this issue. See Part I; Part II. Since I wrote the first two posts, the Ninth Circuit weighed in, affirming the district court’s denial of Google’s motion to dismiss, allowing the plaintiffs to proceed with their complaint.

Since that post, there’s been another development: Google has filed a petition for rehearing and rehearing en banc. And they’ve brought in a bigger gun to do so — noted Supreme Court advocate Seth Waxman — indicating perhaps how far they intend to take this. Google has two basic arguments for why a rehearing should be granted. First, Google attacks what I called the panel’s “radio means radio” interpretation of the term “radio communications” — “radio communications” means “stuff you listen to on a radio” — is unworkable. Second, Google argues that the panel should never have reached the issue of whether wi-fi communications are “readily accessible to the general public” under an ordinary-language approach to that term, because that question involves disputed issues of fact. In the rest of this post I’ll review these two arguments.

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