Stupid Sexy Privacy

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Hey, here's a joke. Knock knock. It's Google Chrome, and I don't need to ask who's there. I already know it's you. I know your search history, your email address, location, device settings, even your financial and medical data. Wow, that's not funny. Now I'm definitely switching to DuckDuckGo. That's smart. If you use Google Search or Chrome, your personal information is probably exposed. And that's no laughing matter. The free DuckDuckGo browser

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Welcome to another edition of Stupid Sexy Privacy, a podcast mini series sponsored by our friends at DuckDuckGo. I'm your host, Rosie Tran. You may have seen me on Rosie Tran Presents, which is now available on Amazon Prime. And I'm your co-producer, Andrew VanVooris. With us, as always, is Bonzo the Snow Monkey. I'm pretty sure that's not what a Japanese Macau sounds like. Oh, it's not. Not even close.

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Let's hope there aren't any zoologists listening. Okay, I'm also pretty sure that's not what a snow monkey sounds like. Over the course of this mini-series, we're going to offer you short, actionable tips to protect your data, your privacy, and yourself from fascists and weirdos.

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These tips were sourced by our fearless leader. He really hates when we call him that. DJ Mendelson. Episodes 1 through 33 were written a couple of years ago. But since a lot of that advice is still relevant, we thought it would be worth sharing again for those who missed it. And if you have heard these episodes before, you should know we've gone back and updated a bunch of them, even adding some brand new interviews and privacy tips along the way. That's right. So before we get into today's episode, make sure you visit StupidSexyPrivacy.com.

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and subscribe to our newsletter. This way you can get updates on the show and be the first to know when new episodes are released in 2026. And if you sign up for the newsletter, you'll also get a free PDF and mp3 copy of BJ and Amanda King's new book, How to Protect Yourself from Bastions and Weirdos. All you have to do is visit StupidSexyPrivacy.com. StupidSexyPrivacy.com. That's what I just said. StupidSexyPrivacy.com.

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I know, but repetition is key to success. You know what else is? What? Bonzo, eat your pablan like a good boy and pretty soon you'll grow up to be a big, strong, handsome man just like your daddy. Then you'll have Swedish pancake too. I'm really glad this show isn't on YouTube because they pull it down like immediately. I know. Google sucks. And on that note, let's get to today's privacy tip.

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This week we're joined by Stevie Gleiberson, the Director of Research and Advocacy at the Center for Privacy and Technology. Stevie has spent her career fighting for access to justice and defending the rights of marginalized families from Georgetown Law's Civil Litigation Clinic to Public Justice to Brooklyn Defender Services. Her work focuses on surveillance and policing, which is exactly why we want to talk to her this week on Stupid Sexy Privacy.

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Stevie, thank you so much for joining us on Stupid, Sexy, Privacy. Would you be so kind as to take a moment to introduce yourself to our audience? Sure. Thanks for having me. My name is Stevie Gleiberson and I am the Director of Research and Advocacy at the Center on Privacy and Technology at Georgetown Law. And can you tell us a little bit about what the center does? Yeah, we do research and advocacy on issues related to privacy, surveillance and digital era technologies.

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um And we've been around for about 10 years. spent our first five to seven years really focused on police use of face recognition technology. ah And since then have expanded out to do a bunch of research and publications on immigration surveillance, continuing to keep our hands in criminal justice ah surveillance technologies and working on some family surveillance and workplace surveillance projects.

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And there's definitely a lot of that that we want to touch on today. um As I was working on my book, I completely missed these two kind of big Supreme Court cases that deal with location data and privacy. And I was hoping you might be able to tell us a little bit about the most recent one for us, is I think it's Chatree versus United States. Did I say that right? I think so. I don't know Mr. Chatree personally, but uh that sounds right to me.

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Chattery uh is a decision that just came down this year from the Supreme Court. And it is probably the most significant Fourth Amendment decision from the Supreme Court since 2018's Carpenter. And Chattery really, mean, at base what it's about is whether the Fourth Amendment is gonna continue to mean anything in today's digital world.

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So the question presented to the court was whether the police violated the Fourth Amendment when they obtained two hours of the defendant, Mr. Chattery's location data from Google through what's called a geofence warrant. So the issue was that the police were investigating a robbery that had taken place in a place called Midlothian, Virginia, just on the outskirts of um Richmond. And a man had been seen.

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A witness said that they saw him coming around the corner from a church with a cell phone to his ear and had come to a bank and then robbed the bank and left on foot. And to try to find out who this person was, what the police decided to do was to go to Google and see if they could get Google to give them uh information about all of the devices that could be found within basically like a football field area around the

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the bank that had been robbed around the time that the robbery had happened. And this is something called a geofence warrant, or some people call them reverse warrants, instead of the traditional thing of police going from a person or a place where they think that they have suspicion or they think evidence of a crime will be found, they basically move backwards to try to identify the person to be suspicious of.

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by drawing a circle around the place where the crime or alleged crime may have occurred and finding just sweeping up all of the devices that can be found there and going from there. Yeah. I mean, that goes without saying these days that this is a pretty major concern when it comes to something like an anti-ice protest. Could you explain just a little bit more about what a geofence warrant is and how it might play a role in something like

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a person tending a nice protest? Yeah. So I think it's helpful to walk through sort of how it worked, how the warrant in the Chattery case worked, because I think that's illustrative of how these things kind of tend to work. Sure. So in this case, I will say the police did get a warrant. They went to a magistrate judge and they got the magistrate judge to sign off on an order that said the Google had to participate in this search process. And what they did um

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was the warrant laid out sort of three steps and we can talk more about how much it demanded at those steps. But at step one, Google would go into its millions and millions of uh users account location history data and find all of the accounts that could be found within like this football field size area around the location.

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during a one hour time period, 30 minutes before the alleged robbery happened and 30 minutes after. And in this case, that search of these millions and millions of accounts, by definition, millions of folks who did not perpetrate this robbery, returned 19 accounts. At step two, uh the police were supposed to go through those 19 accounts and if they could, narrow them down.

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And that's really a requirement that Google placed on them. And that's an interesting dynamic. How much of this is coming from courts regulating the police and how much is companies pushing back or, you know, honestly, just trying to make things easier for themselves. So the police looked through these 19 accounts, which at this point were anonymous. They didn't know who the people were that were connected to them, but they could see ah that they had been in that location at that time.

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and they selected nine accounts out of those. And for those nine accounts, Google then gave them back anonymized tracking data for a two-hour time period, one hour before and one hour after this robbery. And so now the paradigm kind of shifts, right? So we've gone from, we know something happened here at this particular time in this bank, to these folks came to this bank, we wanna see where else they went.

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for these two hours. So now we're following the people and they could have gone anywhere. They could have gone to a doctor's appointment. They could have gone to the church next door. They could have gone to their homes. Obviously the police don't know before they get the data. From those nine accounts, then at step three, they went back to Google and they said, we're really interested in these three accounts. Please unmask them and tell us who they belong to. So then they get the...

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identifying information for three Google account holders. And again, what happened here is one person allegedly robbed this bank. And so by definition, they're now getting potentially the data of one person who maybe committed this crime, although potentially not. Maybe he doesn't have a Google account at all. ah But definitely, at the bare minimum, two folks who had nothing to do with the crime.

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So I think what we see here is just how many people can be impacted by these kinds of searches, even when the police are authorized by a magistrate to be looking for at bottom one person. Right. Now tell me a little bit about Google's role in all this, because we had Cindy Kong on the show not too long ago. in her book, Privacy's Defender, she basically lays out nearly 20 years of

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the big tech companies willy-nilly handing over information like this to law enforcement. I guess what I want to get at here is what is Google's role? Have they been cooperative in the past? And would this new decision change that? Well, so what this decision will change going forward, I think remains to be seen, but

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What's really interesting aspect about all of this is the role that the tech companies, Google and it's like play in all of this. So these kinds of reverse searches like we're seeing here, these geofence warrants, and there's another type called a reverse uh keyword search where you go from looking at the term of interest and looking at all the accounts who put that term into Google, for instance. um

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They were not a technology that the police could even use, you know, more than a decade ago. They're a new technology and a new way of doing policing. And what I think the Chattery and we'll talk in a minute about Carpenter, but what the courts have said is basically we're trying to just hold the line and keep some sense of what the Fourth Amendment meant at the founding, even though we've got these new technologies. But what we've seen is basically

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companies kind of have had free rein to decide how the police should be regulated in all of this and what they're willing to cooperate with and um where they're going to draw the line. And sometimes those lines get drawn in really weird places. And we have some companies who are doing smart things like setting up infrastructure so that they don't even hold the data that the police might want. And that's actually kind of what happened here with Google. um There's some

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data in the decisions about going from basically zero of these warrants when police didn't know they could do it or the technology didn't exist to, I think in the year before Chattery, the search that happened um to Mr. Chattery, Google got something like 11,000 of these requests and was having to respond to them all the time. And honestly, I think they just got tired of it. They were like, we don't want to be doing this anymore. It's so resource intensive. um

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And so they changed the thing that this case is about, the Google location history. They changed the way it works. And now the data that this case is about resides on people's individual phones and not on Google's cloud. um But that doesn't mean there's millions and millions of other sources for data like this. um And lots and lots of companies that are going to have to make decisions about whether they comply and whether they don't um with these kinds of requests.

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Our co-producer, BJ Mendelson, and my co-host, Amanda King, just put out a new book that you really need to read. It's called How to Protect Yourself from Fascists and Weirdos. And this book delivers on what the title promises. If you're worried about the fascist takeover of America, but don't know how or where to start fighting back, this book is for you. If you need practical tips on staying safe at a protest or filming law enforcement without getting indicted, we got you covered. And because life isn't all about the crisis of our time.

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BJ and Amanda even cover how to protect yourself offline for moments like when you realize your date is a total weirdo. The best part? This book is absolutely free. Just head on over to StupidSexyPrivacy.com and click or tap on the word book. Now let's get back to our interview already in progress. Yeah, I know it's a little later on my list of uh questions, but I did want to ask you about that where Cash Patel recently had said that the FBI was purchasing

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data from data brokers. So I kind of wonder, and maybe you can help eliminate this a bit, uh is it, is this just a situation where, you know, the court might say we're going to protect the data or you should protect the data and law enforcement just says, okay, well, I guess we're just going to buy it. mean, I think that's right. And whether there's a way to challenge that purchase, you know, there are legislative efforts, something called the fourth amendment is not for sale act, both at the state and the federal level. There are our efforts to try to close that.

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it's called the data broker loophole, but there are whole industries created around creating and sucking up and repackaging and reselling our data, including really comprehensive location data uh from our phones and our computers and all the ways we access um the internet. And right now the government can just buy it.

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Right. so sort of on a related note uh is this equipment that, software that ICE purchased called WebLock. uh Essentially, we had covered it previously because ICE wanted to set up a detention camp not too far from where we're based. the concern in, because it would have been in residential area, the concern was ICE would just use WebLock to be able to pinpoint everybody's exact location right down to where their phone is.

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using their own tools and not having to rely on the third party. Does Chattery at all protect against that? um I don't think it does at the moment, but the way law moves like this is case by case. And so there's no telling what kind of a challenge um might come down the pike that might expand or continue to limit the protections that Chattery does provide. So the

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The issue with Chatry though is that it didn't even answer the entirety of the question as to Mr. Chatry and as to Google's location history. Cause there's sort of a multi layers, multiple layers of questions that need to get asked when something like this happens. And the only question the court answered here was whether a fourth amendment search occurred, whether by the government going to Google and asking for this data.

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Is that even a Fourth Amendment event basically? Does this count as a search? And after that question, which they answered in the affirmative, they said, yes, this is a search. So the Fourth Amendment applies here. There's many other questions that need to get asked, such as like, was it a reasonable one? Was the warrant that covered it required and was it appropriate? Was there a probable cause and was there a particularized

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description of what was being searched and what was being looked for. And all those questions have been left to the lower court. And there's like a fight among the concurring opinions and among the justices about how that question should come out, whether this court should have answered any of the questions. Those are the kinds of things you see them fighting about through the opinions. But um there continue to be many unanswered questions even about the thing that this case.

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you know specifically was about Right and that's concerning uh given the research that Georgetown has put out where it said that most Americans are in one kind of DHS ice database or another Could you tell us a little bit more about that? Yeah, so I think you're referring to our publication called American dragnet that um came out originally a few years ago and we we republished this year with a new forward given the fact that unfortunately, it's still

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and again, highly, highly relevant, all about how ICE basically uses people's basic needs, their basic needs for transportation, for water, electricity, phone, internet, um and to care for their children, to gather data to target them for deportation. And so we really investigated. um

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how ICE gets the information it has or had then to target people for deportation. And we found things like ICE already a few years ago had scanned the driver's license photos of one in three American adults. And that's adults. That's not non-citizens. That's all of us. And that they had access to the driver's license data of

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three and four adults and could locate three and four of us through our utility records. So, and that, what we saw then has only scaled up. You know, they've only spent more money on purchasing more databases, more data, more access to this information. Some avenues have been cut off thanks to local organizing. You know, there's some organizing efforts in Maryland and in some other states that have tried to cut off some of these avenues, but...

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We have seen, you know, as one avenue gets cut off, ICE finds another way. Yeah. And with so much money at their disposal, ah it seems like a very frustrating game of uh whack-a-mole. And it's honestly even more frustrating because just think about the two incidents ah early this week and then last week where they murdered two people that weren't even targets, right? That there weren't even ah people that they were going for. it's... Right. And claim that they don't have body cam. Yeah, that's right.

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Yeah, not that this is a case in point about why body camps are not the answer, but, you know, they have all this money to spend on. On surveilling all of us and being able to find all of us, but none to, you know, police themselves and to allow for accountability. Yeah, isn't that incredible that in both instances, there's no footage. Oh, man, I mean, we could go on about we can and definitely maybe in the future will go on about ice, but.

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in the time I have left with you, was hoping you might be able to ah tell us a little bit about the Carpenter case, because I feel like this sort of floated under the radar. ah And even I don't, know, I tend to, or I'd like to think I'm pretty knowledgeable in this space, but I didn't know much about this case. So I'm hoping you can teach us a little bit. Yeah. So Carpenter was the last most seminal um Supreme Court decision under the Fourth Amendment uh about

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surveillance in the digital era. And Carpenter was a case that is honestly pretty similar to Chatri. It just used an older version of the same kind of cell phone based location technology um that was at issue here. So what that case was about was something called cell site location information or CSLI. And that is basically whenever your cell phone like operating in the world and

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making sure it has service, it's apparently pinging off of these towers uh as it moves around. And because of those pings, basically pretty frequent intervals about a hundred times a day, there's a record of where your cell phone was located within a sort of large area between like an eighth of a mile, an eighth of a square mile and four square miles. So it's like a big wedge where we can, according to the cell site location information that the cell phone companies hold,

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ah we can be located. And so there was a string of Radio Shack robberies and basically they're trying to figure out if this one guy that they have an interest in, Carpenter, if they can connect him up to those robberies. And so they go to, I think it was Sprint, and they get about 127 days over the course of like when these robberies were happening. They get all of his CSLI data for his cell phone. And what that basically does is it

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retroactively creates a pretty comprehensive log of his movements around the world. Because in Carpenter, the court recognizes that cell phones have become just like a core part of our bodies. There's a line in there, something like, you know, if an alien came down, they might be forgiven for thinking that cell phones were part of human anatomy. And they talk about how, most people take them with them everywhere, including some people into the shower. There's data like that in the decision.

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And so that was the first time that when this new digital cell phone world, the court confronted the question of now that all these records exist and companies are holding them, are we going to let police just go to the companies and go retroactively and piece together our movements and have this comprehensive log of how we've been moving around the world? And that's when the court for the first time said, A,

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Just because a company holds it doesn't mean we're gonna suspend all um critical judgment. That's a really important piece of both of these decisions. Something about the legal term is the third party doctrine. Whether just because a company holds the information, now we've like lost all expectation of privacy in it. um And also are we gonna let the police be able to do something they could never have done in the founding era? Just retroactively tail us.

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through all of our movements um for who knows how long. So ultimately Carpenter decided like, no, just because the company holds it doesn't mean you've lost all expectation of privacy. And there's a whole analysis about how voluntary was it? Did we know we were? Do we know about CSLI? Do we know we're turning over this data? And the court said, we're not gonna let the government just.

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through technology, upend the way we understand privacy and understand our ability to keep certain things from the view of the government. And Carpenter was really important and foundational to Chattery because basically the logic then just gets pulled forward and Kagan goes through really carefully and says, if CSLI was the equivalent of tailing a person through his every move.

25:22
Google's location history is that on steroids. Where CSLI gives you this big wedge of location, Google's location history can pinpoint your location within 20 meters and even can tell your elevation, can tell if you went to the doctor's office on the third floor of a building versus the insurance salesman on the 10th. ah Where CSLI pings about 100 times a day, Google's location history grabs your location.

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every two minutes, is something like 720 times a day. And so it goes through and compares the two and basically says, whatever CSLI was, is that to the max. Right. So for people listening to this, our focus is how to protect yourself from fascist weirdos. so given Chattery and Carpenter, is there anything that you would suggest for people who are interested in, let's say, going out and protesting against ICE or

26:19
participating in any other kind of demonstration or protest? Yeah, I mean, the good news is the court, at least for now, five to six justices are understanding the way the world works today and not suspending their knowledge of how cell phones function and how we as people function, which too often we see judges just not engaging with the way the real world works.

26:47
In this decision, at least in these series of decisions, we have a little hint that, you know, they get it, they get some piece of it. But, you know, if you're really worried about your location being tracked, your cell phone is a tracking device, so leave it at home. But that doesn't mean there aren't other ways that you might be identified. You know, I mentioned earlier, we've done a lot of work on face recognition technology, and that's another thing we've seen used to like identify uh folks in a crowd and identify folks from afar. But at the end of the day, also, I mean, all of this

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Our work is about understanding it, exposing it, making sure people understand it, but also we don't want people to be cowed. Part of what this is all about uh is trying to make us scared. Kagan's decision talks a little bit about how if they didn't decide the way that they did, we're heading towards a digital panopticon, which is this idea of like a prison where...

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one guard is capable of watching everyone at once and you never know whether you're being watched. So you better change your behavior to, to, um, you know, follow the rules so that if at any moment you are being watched, you're, you're in the clear. That's sort of what they're trying to create. And we shouldn't, we shouldn't allow it. Like go protest, be with your people, keep yourself safe. Um, and, and stand up for one another, especially those of us that have privilege and aren't as vulnerable, you know,

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be there to serve as cover for your compatriots. I think that's beautifully said. Oh, Q, where can we find you online? Where can we find the research that's being put out? Yeah, we are at GeorgetownPrivacy.org, or you can just Google the Privacy Center at Georgetown Law. um And all of our reports and all of our work is up there. And if you want to, you can join us October 6th to 7th.

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in DC for Life After Data, the conference on de-datification. There's more information on our website. It should be a fun time. That sounds amazing. And we'll include information on that in the show notes. Awesome.

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There's no stupid, sexy privacy without our friends at DuckDuckGo. So if you want to thank them for making the show possible, we hope you'll check them out. Because stupid, sexy privacy is a people-powered project. With a couple of exceptions, like producing podcast transcripts through Riverside. We don't use AI. Everyone who works here is getting compensated for their time, effort, and energy. The only way that's possible is to find good partners like DuckDuckGo.

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So today we're going to highlight DuckDuckGo's web browser, a tool millions of people have switched to in order to safely search and browse the web. And the best part is the DuckDuckGo browser is free, just like all the content we create at Stupid Sexy Privacy. We make our money from DuckDuckGo. DuckDuckGo makes its money by selling privacy-respecting search advertising. These are ads based on what you've searched for. They're not generated by data gathered without your consent.

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And if you have an Android phone, the DuckDuckGo app offers a nice additional layer of privacy. It does this by blocking invasive data harvesting from the other apps on your phone. For example, when BJ wrote this ad in the last hour, DuckDuckGo's app tracking protection for Android blocked 218 tracking attempts by Substack and four other apps on his phone. And in the last week, DuckDuckGo's app blocked 9,202 tracking attempts across 11 different apps. This included 43 tracking attempts from the Starbucks app.

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despite the fact that BJ hasn't been a Starbucks in over a month. At Stupid Sexy Privacy, we're never going to recommend you use something that we don't use ourselves. So do you want to take back control of your personal information? Well, there's a browser designed for data protection, not data collection, and that's DuckDuckGo. Make sure you visit DuckDuckGo.com today and check out this episode's show notes for a link to download the DuckDuckGo browser for your laptop and mobile device.

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This episode of Stupid Sexy Privacy was recorded in Hollywood, California. It was written by BG Mendelson, produced by Andrew Van Vorse, and hosted by me, Rosie Tran. And of course, our program is sponsored by our friends DuckDuckGo. If you enjoy the show, I hope you'll take a moment to leave us a review on PocketCast, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you may be listening. This won't take more than two minutes of your time, and leaving us a review will help other people find it.

31:23
We have a crazy goal of helping 5 % of Americans get 1 % better at protecting themselves from fascists and weirdo. Your reviews can help us reach that goal, since leaving one makes our show easier to find. So please take a moment to leave us a review and I'll see you right back here next Thursday at midnight. After you watch Rosie Tran Presents on Amazon Prime, right? Bonzo, I wish that you'll have many more birthdays just like this one. With those you love and trust around you always to share your happiness.

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And I wish that you'll get a chance very soon to prove that being loved and looked after like a human being has made you feel like a human being. And that if love can do that to you, then it ought to be able to make some other human beings... ...human beings.