Police Increasingly Looking To Smartphones For Evidence 225
Barence writes "Your smartphone could place you at the scene of a crime, destroy an alibi or maybe even provide one – which is why one of the first things police now do at the scene of a crime is take away a suspect's cellphone. This look into smartphone forensics reveals how even wiping incriminating data from iPhones isn't enough to get criminals off the hook. 'If you're looking at your email messages and you rotate the phone, there's a snapshot of that message,' said Phil Ridley, a mobile phone analyst with CCL-Forensics. And what people leave on their phones is horrific. 'We were contacted by police who couldn't get a video to work on a handset – it turned out to be a bloke beheading someone in his garage,' claimed another forensics expert."
Re:Location proves nothing (Score:2, Informative)
You can ask about 15 teenagers arrested for criminal trespass at a local park about this where I live. A couple months ago, the city DA got location records from the cell providers, found location logs of people's cells who were at a park after dusk, then did a mass arrest sweep.
Just the fact their phones were in the park after dusk was good enough for a jury to convict and give them 3-6 months in jail each.