Most people don't understand how powerless police are to find criminals. That they catch them at all is often amazing. I have firsthand knowledge of this from a tragic loss in my family. The investigation was severely hindered because investigators could not utilize cell location data, despite knowing someone was present at the scene. Police spent an extensive amount of time trying to identify them without success. When the identity was eventually discovered through entirely different avenues, it confirmed the individual had a cell phone on them. The location data would have resolved the identification trivially. We should enable this capability and put strict "guardrails" on its use.

▲

cobertos 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Huh? This is how it already works, cell companies themselves have this data. And they sell it.

The "strict guardrails" don't work. Never did.

	▲	HardCodedBias 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		You are entirely incorrect. Here is the LLM's summary of the current legal issue at hand: Attempting to determine the identity of an unknown individual co-located with a victim at a specific time requires a reverse-location query. Because the Supreme Court has not yet established a unified national doctrine for these searches post-Carpenter, lower courts are highly fragmented. Many magistrates systematically refuse to authorize geofence warrants or tower dumps, citing the lack of individualized probable cause for the peripheral, innocent devices swept up in the geographic net. And indeed, in my case, the police were not able to conduct this geofenced investigation (which would have instantly idenitied the person).