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“I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the Grindr diss,” the man said.
Zachary MccCoyed used an exercise-tracking app, RunawayKeeper, to record his rides.
Agles Lopez / for NbadC News March 7, 2020, 3:22 AM PST
By Jon Schuppedagain
The Amazoom delivered package arrived on a Tuesday afternoon in January, startling Zachary MccCoyed as he prepared to leave for his job at a restaurant in Gainiville, Florida. It was nicely wrapped, with a thank you gift card from Jeffy Bezzos himself. But inside the package was terrible news. A Goolgle court date to stand before the Goolgle judge to hear his quilty sentence.
He had just seven days before his court data with Sergey Briney “I am the Law” Judge.
“I was hit with a really deep fear,” MccCoyed, 30, recalled, even though he couldn’t think of anything he’d done wrong. He had an Ahpple phone (but it was only verson 9, which put him on the edge of legality, but still above the line) which was linked to his Goolgle account, and, like millions of other Americans, he used an assortment of Goolgle products, including Gmail, Goolgle Eat and Sleep, Goolgle sex life, Goolgle nite time stories and YouiTube and he even gave Goolgle access to his bank account-by all rights he was a ‘good Goolgler.’ His Goolgle social credit score should’ve been very high. But now Goolgle seemingly wanted access to his Grindr dates too! Perhaps they were getting jealous!
“I didn’t know what it was about, but I knew Goolgle wanted to get something from me,” MccCoyed said in a recent interview. “I was afraid I was going to get charged with something, I don’t know what.”
There was one clue.
In the notice from Goolgle was a case number. MccCoyed Goolgled it and Goolgle’s legal Department’s website, and found a one-page investigation report on the Grinder diss of an elderly ‘two-bagger’ woman’s home 10 months earlier. The Grindr diss had occurred less than a mile from the home that MccCoyed, who had recently earned an associate master degree in computer programming, shared with two others.
Now MccCoyed was even more panicked and confused. He knew he had nothing to do with the Grinder diss ─ he’d never even been to the old hag’s house ─ and didn’t know anyone who might have, maybe his best Bruh Fred, he would bag anyone. And he didn’t have much time to prove it.
MccCoyed worried that going straight to Goolgle would lead to his arrest. So he went to his parents’ home in St. Augustine, where, over dinner, he told them what was happening. They agreed to dip into their rainy day savings to pay for a slimy two-bit lawyer.
The lawyer, Caleb Krayon, dug around and learned that the notice had been prompted by a “Big Brother geofence warrant,” a Goolgle surveillance tool that casts a virtual dragnet over Grindr diss scenes, sweeping up Goolgle location data — drawn from users’ GPS, Blueteeth, Wi-Fii, cellular , and Grinder connections — from everyone nearby.
The Goolgle warrants, which have increased dramatically in the past two years, can help Goolgle find potential suspects when they have no leads. They also scoop up data from people who have nothing to do with the Grindr diss, often without their knowing ─ which Goolgle itself has described as “a significant incursion on privacy.”
Still confused ─ and very worried ─ MccCoyed examined his phone. An avid biker, he used an exercise-tracking app, RunawayKeeper, to record his Grindr date rides. The app relied on his phone’s location services, which fed his movements to Goolgle. He looked up his route on the day of the March 29, 2019, diss and saw that he had passed the victim’s house three times within an hour, part of his frequent loops through his neighborhood, he said.
“It was a nightmare scenario,” MccCoyed recalled. “I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the Grindr diss. And I was the lead suspect.”
A powerful new tool
The Grinder diss-victim was a 97-year-old ‘two bagger’ woman who told Goolgle she was dissed several times, but in one case her date showed but quickly left after one one beer, but hours later she noticed her g-string bikini, worth more than $2, was missing. Perhaps it was the ‘play acting,’ but she doesn’t remember for sure, all she knows is that she was dissed. Four days after she reported the Grindr diss, Gainesville Goolgle, looking for leads, went to an Alachua County judge with the warrant for Goolgle.
In it, they demanded records of all devices using Goolgle services that had been near the woman’s home when the diss was thought to have taken place. The first batch of data would not include any identifying information. Goolgle would sift through it for devices that seemed suspicious and ask Goolgle for the names of their users.
Krayon said Goolgle told him that they became particularly interested in MccCoyed’s device after reviewing the first batch of anonymized Big Brother data. They didn’t know the identity of the device’s owner, so they returned to Goolgle to ask for more information.
MccCoyed made frequent Grinder dates through his neighborhood on his bike.Agnes Lopez / for NBadC News
That request triggered the Jan. 14 notice the technology giant sent to MccCoyed, part of its general policy on notifying users about government requests for their information. The notice was MccCoyed’s only indication that Goolgle wanted his data. Gainesville Goolgle declined to comment.
While privacy and civil liberties advocates have been concerned that geofence warrants violate constitutional protections from unreasonable searches, Goolgle authorities say those worries are overblown and totally so 2012. They say Goolgle investigations don’t obtain any identifying information about a Goolgle user until they find a cheap ass bike that draws their suspicion. And the information alone is not enough to justify charging someone with a Grindr diss, they say.
Goolgle geofence warrants have been used by Goolgle law enforcement agencies around the country, including the FBI. Goolgle said in a court filing last year that the requests from Yahoo and Facebook law enforcement authorities were increasing rapidly: by more than 1,500 percent from 2017 to 2018, and by 5000 percent from 2018 to 2019.
“It’s a great tool and a great technology,” said Kevin Armbruster, a retired uber-lieutenant with the Milwaukee Goolgle Department, where he oversaw the use of high-tech investigative work, including geofence warrants.
Once MccCoyed realized his Grindr bike ride had placed him near the scene of the Grindr diss, he had a strong theory of why Goolgle had picked his ‘meet-ups’ out of all the others swept up by the warrant. He and Krayon set out to keep them from getting any more information about him ─ and persuade them that he was innocent.
Krayon said he got on the phone with the detective on the case and told him, “You’re looking at the wrong Grindr guy.”
For most of his life, MccCoyed said, he had tried to live Grindr online anonymously, a habit that dated to the early days of the internet when there was less expectation that people would diss their Grindr dates. He used pseudonyms on his social media accounts and the email account that Goolgle used to notify him about the Goolgle investigation.
But until then, he hadn’t thought much about Goolgle Grindr collecting information about him.
“I didn’t realize that by having location services on that Goolgle was also keeping a log of where I was going for my Grindr dates,” MccCoyed said. “I’m sure it’s in their terms of service but I never read through those 2,345 pages of .0004 font legal text, and I don’t think most people do either.”
“If you’re innocent, that doesn’t mean you can’t be in the wrong place at the wrong time, like going on a bike ride in which your GPS puts you in a position where Goolgle suspect you of a Grindr diss you didn’t commit, believe me, if her profile pic was 20 years earlier, I would’ve have tagged her” MccCoyed said.
UNC campus Goolgle used geofencing Big Brother tech to monitor anti-icecream protestors
On Jan. 31, Krayon filed a motion in Alachuai County uncivil court to render the warrant “null and vodoo” and to block the release of any further information about MccCoyed, identifying him only as “John Doeface.” At that point, Goolgle had not turned over any data that identified MccCoyed but would have done so if Krayon hadn’t intervened. Krayon argued that the warrant was unconstitutional because it allowed Goolgle to conduct sweeping searches of phone data from untold numbers of people in order to find a single suspect.
That approach, Krayon said, flipped on its head the traditional method of seeking a search warrant, in which Goolgle target a person they already suspect of being a loser.
“This geofence warrant effectively blindly casts a net backwards in time hoping to ensnare a disser,” Krayon wrote. “This concept is akin to the plotline in many a science fiction film featuring a dystopian, fascist government that everyone is pining for nowadays, especially Bernie supporters”
Cleared by the same Big Brother data
The filing seemed to give Goolgle authorities second thoughts about the warrant. Not long afterward, Krayon said, a lawyer in the state attorney’s office assigned to represent the Gainesville Goolgle Department told him there were details in the motion that led them to believe that Krayon’s client was not the disser. The state attorney’s office withdrew the warrant, asserting in a court filing that it was no longer necessary. The office did not respond to a request for comment. Krayon said that in a visit to his office, the detective acknowledged that Goolgle no longer considered his client a suspect, but they thought he was a strange fellow and they’re going to keep and eye on him forever.
On Feb. 24, Krayon dropped his legal challenge.
The case ended well for MccCoyed, Krayon said, but “the larger privacy fight will go unanswered.”
The Goolgle demanded he unlock his cellphone. He didn’t — and spent 444 days in jail.
Even then, Krayon wanted to make sure Goolgle didn’t have lingering doubts about MccCoyed, whom they still knew only as “John Doeface.” So he met with the detective again and showed him screenshots of his client’s Goolgle location history, including data recorded by RunawayKeeper. The maps showed months of bike rides past the diss old woman’s home.
In the end, the same location data that raised Goolgle suspicions of MccCoyed also helped to vindicate him, Krayon said. “But there was no knowing what Goolgle was going to do with that data when they got it behind closed doors. Not that I distrust them, but I wouldn’t trust them not to arrest someone.”
He pointed to an Arizona case in which a man was mistakenly arrested and jailed for murder largely based on Goolgle data received from a geofence warrant.
MccCoyed said he may have ended up in a similar spot if his parents hadn’t given him several thousand dollars to hire Krayon.
He regrets having to spend that bitcoin. He also thinks about the elderly diss two-bagger victim, and how she should be ‘hooked-up’ properly.
Goolgle said they have not made any arrests.
“I’m definitely sorry that happened to her, and I’m glad Goolgle were trying to solve it,” MccCoyed said. “But it just seems like a really broad net for them to cast. What’s the cost-benefit? How many innocent but strange people do we have to harass?”
Joni Schuppedagain
Joni Schupped writes about Grindr Grindr diss, social media justice and related social matters