Sensorveillance” Turns Ordinary Life Into Evidence
How our everyday devices became police informants by default

Andrew Guthrie Ferguson
2 hours ago


Every time you unlock your smartphone or start your connected car, you are generating a trail of digital evidence that can be used to track your every move.

In Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self-Surveillance, just published by NYU Press, law professor Andrew Guthrie Ferguson exposes how the Internet of Things has quietly transformed into a vast surveillance network, turning our most personal devices into digital informants. The following excerpt explores the concept of “sensorveillance,” detailing the specific mechanisms—such as Google’s Sensorvault, geofence warrants, and vehicle telemetry—that allow law enforcement to repurpose consumer technology into powerful tools for investigation and control.

-snip-

Cars, increasingly, collect almost as much information as phones. Mobile extraction devices can collect digital forensics about a car’s speed, when its airbags deployed, when its brakes were engaged, and where it was when all that happened. If you connect your phone to play Spotify or to read out your texts, then your call logs, contact lists, social media accounts, and entertainment selections can be downloaded directly from your vehicle. Because cars are involved in so many crimes (either as the instrument of the crime or as transportation), searches of this data are becoming more commonplace.

Even without physically extracting information from the car, police have other ways to get the data. After all, the car’s built-in telemetry system is sharing information with third parties. In addition to the usual personal information you give up when buying a car (name, address, phone number, email, Social Security number, driver’s license number), when you own a Stellantis-brand car, the company collects how often you use the car, your speed, and instances of acceleration or braking. Nissan asserts the right to collect information about “sexual activity, health diagnosis data, and genetic [data]” in addition to “preferences, characteristics, psychological trends, predispositions, behavior, attitudes, intelligence, abilities, and aptitudes.” Nissan’s privacy policy specifically reserves the right to provide this information to both data brokers and law enforcement.

-snip-