Police Use Fitbit Data To Charge 90-Year-Old Man In Stepdaughter's Killing (nytimes.com) 108
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The last time Anthony Aiello spoke to his stepdaughter, he took homemade pizza and biscotti to her house in San Jose, Calif., for a brief visit. Mr. Aiello, 90, told investigators that she then walked him to the door and handed him two roses in gratitude. But an unnoticed observer in the house later revealed that their encounter ended in murder, a police report said. Five days afterward, Mr. Aiello's stepdaughter, Karen Navarra, 67, was discovered by a co-worker in her house with fatal lacerations on her head and neck. She had been wearing a Fitbit fitness tracker, which investigators said showed that her heart rate had spiked significantly around 3:20 p.m. on Sept. 8 (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), when Mr. Aiello was there. Then it recorded her heart rate slowing rapidly, and stopping at 3:28 p.m., about five minutes before Mr. Aiello left the house, the report said. Mr. Aiello was arrested last week on murder charges and booked into the Santa Clara County Jail, the San Jose Police Department said. On Thursday, he will appear in court in the Hall of Justice in San Jose, according to the Santa Clara County district attorney's office. "[T]he police said their investigation used a combination of video surveillance and data from Ms. Navarra's Fitbit, an Alta HR device, which she wore on her left wrist and synchronized with a computer in her home, where she lived alone," reports NYT. When asked for comment, Fitbit shared a copy of its privacy policy, stating in part that they comply with legal processes, including search warrants and court orders, when it shares data.
Just a handy reminder (Score:4, Insightful)
Tech companies are not, will not, and cannot be your friends.
In this case it's cool if they legit caught a murderer with it because at least it actually caught someone who did something terrible instead of the feds spending hundreds of manhours to bust your local weed dealer and shoot his dog or whatever, but don't think for a minute anything you have that collects data on you can be trusted.
Re:Just a handy reminder (Score:5, Interesting)
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The times needed for this case have a lot of leeway. There's not going to be doubt that something happened an hour later than the device claimed. Combine with video evidence that she didn't leave the house, which also corroborates the time, the logging of heart rate is going to show that she probably only met one person.
Your theory is more along the lines of "omg, I'm going to jail, I have to invent some desparate theory to confuse the jury!" But convictions are based upon "beyond a reasonable doubt" and
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Time on a PC is not going to drift by very much if disconnected from NTP. The crystals used have accuracies measured in parts per million (10 for good ones, 50 or 100 for crappy ones), or just a few seconds per day. If the crystal is very inaccurate then that inaccuraty will not vary much and so can be measured.
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If the time happened to be wrong on one of the devices.... What are the chances that the times would still appear to line up with the time this guy came to visit, and the time he left?
By all means: they should study what the clock currently says on the video system AND the fitbit system and surveil over a period of time in their natural environment for any possible errors, But In the absence of any other possible suspect on the video surveillance over the days in question, this seems pretty damnin
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I wonder if it really sync'd with her PC, or with her phone. Either way, any modern PC will come with settings for automatically syncing with a NTP cluster, not a single server. Plus the clock in the fitbit is likely fairly accurate, controlled by a quartz crystal and unlikely to drift more than 30 seconds a month.
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You would still need to have a really good motive in order to convict a 90 year old of murder.
In an actual criminal trial, the motive is pretty much irrelevant.
"I had no good reason to hack that person to death" is not much of a defence when you're caught with a bloody axe in your hands running out of someone's front door.
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Your fitbit motion sensor showed you were jerking off last night at home instead, and your DVR shows you were watching Dancing With The Stars.
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They are a friend to money, I trust greed.
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Where's the problem in this case? (Score:5, Insightful)
Tech companies are not, will not, and cannot be your friends.
A certain amount of paranoia is certainly warranted in technology any time it harvests your information, for sure.
However in this case a device that the victim owned and activated was used to obtain information on her last moments alive. The NYT article shows that the police obtained a warrant to get the data, as they should. The data then was used to construct a timeline to determine what happened, when.
While the fitbit is not marketed as a crime-fighting device, it was a useful tool in this investigation. I don't really see what the problem here is. There is no indication that the victim was wearing the fitbit against her own will.
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I hope they checked the time on the fitness tracker. It says she died shortly before the guy left... Assuming that the fitness tracker data was correctly timestamped.
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Maybe you should look up NTP. Does a device that syncs over the web really need its clock set manually?
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Yes. My old PC consistently and repeatedly failed to correctly tell the time, despite using NTP to try and keep it accurate.
Played havoc with HTTPS and file timestamps.
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My old PC consistently and repeatedly failed to correctly tell the time, despite using NTP to try and keep it accurate.
Some PCs have a broken or inaccurate Real-Time Clock, and if it was say a Linux server implementation, there is a good chance NTP was default configured to use the local RTC as one of its time sources; most systems have clocks that are a little bit fast or slow, and NTP If Correctly-configured attempts to discipline the local clock.
It's rare, but if the clock is just broken; it's go
Re:Where's the problem in this case? (Score:5, Informative)
I hope they checked the time on the fitness tracker. It says she died shortly before the guy left... Assuming that the fitness tracker data was correctly timestamped.
The NYT article mentions that the fitbit was using NTP, as was the camera that showed what time he left. The USA Today summary left that (and arguably more importantly the fact that the police obtained a warrant to get the fitbit data) out.
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Bloody paywalls. Thanks for providing that info.
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Of course I always support journalists, so I wouldn't do that myself. No sir.
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Even if she died shortly after he left, the heart rate logging can show other details. Ie, was she sedentary most of the time until it appeared that she walked around shortly before dying - ie, she met one person only? The times are useful but not vital to proving that the investigation should move forward. And of course the date is most likely to be correctly timestamped, it would be a hard sell to try to convince a jury that the time was way off and that this creates "reasonable" doubt. Also, of cours
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My beer glass wasn't listed as a crime fighting device either, but that didn't stop them lifting my prints from the glass disproving my story that I had never been at the house.
*Note did not happen, but just reitterating your comment that the tech here is not special in any way.
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They will if they need to get the data in the first place if it's not at the murder scene but stored in Fitbit's back office.
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The key is the warrant. At any time, those access needs to be done with a warrant, signed by a judge and the warrant need to be made publicly accessible once resolved. We can't never trust at 100% any system to be always fair. Someone will misuse it, we need to be able to catch that.
While the USA Today article did not mention it, the NYT article plainly stated that indeed the police did obtain a warrant for the fitbit data.
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The NYT article shows that the police obtained a warrant to get the data,
Yeah, but pretty soon the police will be fishing through Fitbit data for dead people. You just can't trust The Man.
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They are dead. They have no need for privacy and if they were murdered, the living have a vested interest in finding the killers before they kill again.
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Whether a laceration occurred before or after death is one of the easier things for a pathologist to determine.
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That's a strange theory, Bruce!
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While the fitbit is not marketed as a crime-fighting device, it was a useful tool in this investigation. I don't really see what the problem here is. There is no indication that the victim was wearing the fitbit against her own will.
I think that is exactly the problem. People wear them (seemingly) at will. People willingly give up more and more information about themselves.
In this case, it could be used to catch a killer which nobody could really argue against.
The real point is that so many people are willing to give up their personal data without thought to how it can be used against them. You can't get that data back.
Where I work, our health insurance company penalizes you for not using these trackers. Um, I mean you get a discou
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While the fitbit is not marketed as a crime-fighting device, it was a useful tool in this investigation. I don't really see what the problem here is. There is no indication that the victim was wearing the fitbit against her own will.
Where I work, our health insurance company penalizes you for not using these trackers. Um, I mean you get a discount if you do. So almost everyone I work with went out and bought one of those things and sync it up with our healthcare provider. "Hey, look how many steps I took today!" You can actually track the data manually on a website, but people are willing to sell their information for convenience. And to an insurance company! If they can find any reason to use that information against you, they most certainly will. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but you've given them the ammunition.
Sure, but that is a decision that an individual is making. The device is designed to do a certain function, and the individual chooses to use that device or not. Is it the fault of the fitbit or the manufacturer of the fitbit that this happened?
I don't own a fitbit (or anything like one) but doesn't it come with a EULA that specifies this data is being retained by the manufacturer? If you don't like that, you can always get an analog pedometer instead (which of course won't track when your heart sto
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Sure, but that is a decision that an individual is making. The device is designed to do a certain function, and the individual chooses to use that device or not. Is it the fault of the fitbit or the manufacturer of the fitbit that this happened?
No, not at all. But when they partner with other companies, like insurance companies, it gets very dangerous. It's really a cost/benefit equation. The benefit is instant gratification. The cost is long reaching. EULAs are quagmires in their own right, does anyone ever read them fully and understand them? There is a much simpler way to handle it - don't give out your information if you cannot control how it is used. I am not foolish enough to think that these days you can realistically do that in ever
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There is a much simpler way to handle it - don't give out your information if you cannot control how it is used.
Which is why I'm not on facebook.
That said there are other places where one can make some decisions on the matter. I'm not familiar with fitbit as I don't own one; how much personal information does it really hold? Do you have to register with all your personal information in order to use it or does it just use a name and email address? I definitely agree that you are justified in being concerned about the information being leaked to insurance companies, who indeed seek out any excuse they can to in
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I don't really see what the problem here is.
I think he was implying something along the lines: If the police are not your friends (E.G. If you are a criminal), then the Tech companies that make your toys and gadgets you use won't be your friends, either. As in: they won't keep secret the information you disseminate through their cloud and 3rd party services in order to protect you from potential prosecution using your own information, And if the murderer had used the fitbit or other GPS device
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police can get customer info from 3rd parties without a warrant
I've said it in a few other replies, and I'll say it again here. The NYT article plainly states that the police did obtain a warrant for the fitbit info. The USA Today writeup did not mention that.
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Which bit of " the feds spending hundreds of manhours to bust your local weed dealer" do you think isn't following proper procedures?
Those manhours are getting warrants and court orders for the tracking data for everyone they bust with a joint in their pocket, and thus finding that local dealer that they all visit... Nothing illegal or improper about that, just a furthering of self inflicted surveillance.
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Which bit of " the feds spending hundreds of manhours to bust your local weed dealer" do you think isn't following proper procedures?
Those manhours are getting warrants and court orders for the tracking data for everyone they bust with a joint in their pocket, and thus finding that local dealer that they all visit... Nothing illegal or improper about that, just a furthering of self inflicted surveillance.
Found the dope fiend!
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So you would cover for your friends if they murder someone?
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Depends on who they murdered
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Depends on who they murdered
Yes, that's the "well it would be morally justifiable to murder a baby Adolf Hitler, therefore child murder is not always bad" argument.
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I don't follow your logic.
For this case, FitBit was holding onto such data. Then it gave it via established legal policies. (Unlike the Bush Era Phone call monitoring, which it was just a blanket sending of data the the Government)
As for relating it to the failed war on drugs this isn't a Tech companies problem, this is a problem with our society.
The part that I would feel more concerned about was the fact that FitBit was able to retrieve the information with a Warrant. A good security model would be that
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Tech companies are picky about friendships (Score:2)
If any of my friends are reading this, if you're a murderer I'm not your friend either.
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Crimes of passion are just people trying to get justice. That weed dealer is murdering and ruining peoples live simply for profit.
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Well FitBit doesn't monitor hits to the head. Also in a lot of cases. I put on my health tracker, I go for cardio run. My Heart Beats exceeding 170bpm then I stop, Cooling down, I take off the fitbit, just because I do not want it on me.
Did I just take off the device or did I just die?
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Well, from TFA, it looks like your question is irrelevant. They found a dead person. They got a warrant to look at the Fitbit data, which suggested strongly that whatsername died while whatsisname was physically present. T
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His point is whether the FitBit can differientiate someone taking their FitBit off vs "death".
The answer is probably "no", but in this case it would be easy to tell since the police would know if the FitBit was found on the body.
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Pattern 1 : no heartbeat, instant jump to moderate heartbeat, gradual boost to high heartbeat, slow decline in heartbeat back to moderate levels, instant cessation of heartbeat.
Pattern 2 : moderate heartbeat since daybreak, instant jump to high heartbeat, rapid decline in heartbeat that continues down to no heartbeat.
One of these matches someone wearing a fitbit just for exercise.
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Tracking devices (Score:4, Insightful)
A cell phone is a tracking devices that happens to be able to make phone calls. Seems like fitness trackers are just that.
90 year old? (Score:2, Funny)
If I ever get to be 90 I wish I could be anywhere near fit enough to kill someone. Not that I would want to but do that but if you can actually kill someone violently it means you can move properly, which a lot of 90 year olds can't.
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When I'm 90, I'll just have my 24 year old nymphomaniac ninja girlfriend do all my killings for me.
Re:90 year old? (Score:5, Funny)
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When you are 90 year old, your 24 year old ninja girlfriend is a necrophiliac, not nymphomaniac.
To be fair, she be both - and desperately in need of therapy.
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Well it stated he killed his step daughter, who was 67. If he stayed in good shape, or her health was diminished. It makes it quite possible.
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I would assume any reasonable coroner already thought of that.
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Evidence does not exist in a vacuum.
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Charge. Look it up. No need to be certain at this point, there will ultimately be a jury of his peers to decide if the data is certain or not.
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Are they absolutely certain about the time sync between the cameras and the fitbit? Are they certain that the fitbit data corresponds with death?
If they have video footage of he opening the door, taking out the trash, mowing the lawn, whatever, they take take that timestamp and match it up to the corresponding activity rate on the fitbit. About all the defense would be able to do is argue that the fitbit somehow lost/gained time and the killing happened after he left. There should be enough data to demonstrate how well the fitbit keeps time to counter that argument though (assuming the fitbit does in fact keep consistent time).
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Are they absolutely certain about the time sync between the cameras and the fitbit? Are they certain that the fitbit data corresponds with death?
It's pretty shocking how few people in Law Enforcement check on slashdot before jumping to conclusions isn't it?
Gamification (Score:1)
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Any are there so many anonymous cowards today trying to prove this guy was innocent? Are you indeed Mr Aiello using the internet from your jail cell?
The jury of your peers will decide this, not Slashdot. And there is much more evidence than the fitbit. Perhaps you should not have falsely claimed that you saw the deceased driving in her car with a friend past your window?
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The fitbit and video evidence shows that the suspect lied about his activities. This points the finger of suspicion back at him, the police investigate and get more evicence. So far we only have a small fraction of the evidence, as police are not usually so likely to give out the entirety of the case to the local newspaper.
A bit on the chilling side of narratives (Score:3)
She had been wearing a Fitbit fitness tracker, which investigators said showed that her heart rate had spiked significantly around 3:20 p.m. on Sept. 8 (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source), when Mr. Aiello was there. Then it recorded her heart rate slowing rapidly, and stopping at 3:28 p.m., about five minutes before Mr. Aiello left the house, the report said.
Yeesh. I'd imagine anyone looking at that data, knowing that a murder had been committed, would get a cold shiver down their spine, watching the heartrate data do that.
That being said.. while in this case a tracking device (which is what Fitbit is, after all) has provided the time-of-death evidence necessary to catch a killer, it's still completely fucked up that people are voluntarily wearing a tracking device like Fitbit that gives away such valuable personal data to any corporation for any reason -- that apparently the police and other government agencies can then have access to. Don't do it, folks.
Most unlikely suicide (Score:1)
Note to self: (Score:3)
Post the accelerometer data (Score:2)
*thump* *thump* *thump* *thump* *thump* *thump*
Gallows humor is always funny.
Coming soon to Apple Watch (Score:2)
In any case, these devices are generally going to be able to identify whether they're on a wrist or not, particularly with newer ones that also include pulse oximeters. I could easily see both fitness trackers and smartwatches being able to detect patterns that look like severe health issues and/or death and the ability to contact emergency services.
The biggest roadblocks are going to be regulatory and l
fitbit serves another useful purpose (Score:2)