The Indiana Supreme Court has ruled that police cannot constitutionally force a person to unlock their smartphone by giving up their passcode. The ruling, made Tuesday, has been praised by the Electronic Frontier Fountain (EFF).
A Siri Shortcut activated by the phrase “Hey, Siri, I’m being pulled over” could prove valuable in the event of a police traffic stop. The shortcut triggers your iPhone to start recording video from its front-facing camera, pauses any music, sends your location to a trusted contact, and uploads the video to iCloud or another cloud server of your choice.
The shortcut is designed to help protect users during interactions with law enforcement.
Protests across the United States led to a spike in interest in iPhone applications that let users listen to police radios. Several of these now rank very high on App Store top charts.
New York City police officers will soon use an iPhone application to record their daily activities. The officers previously used paper memo pads for these notes, going back to around 1900.
The NYPD’s switch to an iPhone app for taking notes is yet another step in the force’s modernization using Apple devices.
Apple has booted an app used by protesters in Hong Kong out of the App Store. Called Hkmap Live, the crowdsourced app uses reports from a Telegram group that tracks the whereabouts of police and protesters. It also contains information about things like arrests of people wearing protest-related paraphernalia and the use of weapons like tear gas.
“Your app contains content – or facilitates, enables, and encourages an activity – that is not legal,” Apple told the app makers. “Specifically, the app allowed users to evade law enforcement.”
Google Maps has added the ability for drivers to see speed limits and speed traps in more than 40 countries.
The feature was previously exclusive to Waze, which is also owned by Google. It started making its way to Maps in January, but was limited to a small number of markets.
Being forced by police to unlock your smartphone with your face or fingerprint is illegal, a California judge recently ruled.
Previous U.S. judges had ruled that cops could use biometric data to make you unlock your device, but not your passcode. The newest ruling could be a landmark case for protecting the privacy of citizens, although law enforcement officials aren’t terribly excited about it.
Apple is planning to present police officers in South Korea with a plaque to celebrate their work cracking down on almost $1 million worth of fake accessories.
The fake products were supposedly shipped in from China under the guise of being official Apple products. Their distributors are under investigation for potential fraud and trademark violation.
Police might have cracked the crime ring behind the spate of snatch-and-grab robberies in Apple Stores across California, but Apple’s taking no chances. According to a new report, it has contracted local police departments to bring officers in as extra security in some of its stores.
Specifically, the report notes that Apple is doing this in Sacramento. However, we wouldn’t be surprised if Apple followed a similar strategy in other locations which have been the target of criminals.
The Roseville Police Department in California has released a photo of two of the thieves who robbed a local Apple Store this week.
The crooks stole 20 iPhones, two MacBook Pros, and one iPad mini. Fortunately no-one was hurt during the robbery, which involved no weapons.
Distracted driving is a major source of accidents. In hopes of combatting the problem, road signs that can detect whether a cell phone is in use are being tested in the UK.
The signs currently just light up to remind the motorist to put down their phone. Plans to record the license plates of drivers receiving warnings are being considered. And traffic citations are the likely next step.
An Australian woman claims her mother-in-law was killed in their home by unknown assilants, but data from the victim’s Apple Watch contradicts that testimony.
An Apple Watch tracks the wearer’s heartbeat. This means it knows exactly when that heart stops, allowing Adelaide police to know precisely when this murder had taken place. And that was far earlier than claimed.
California cops will use decoy buses and undercover officers to try and catch the person who keeps shooting at Apple employee shuttles.
Google shuttle buses have also been targeted by pellet guns, and at least 20 incidents have been reported since January of this year. The FBI has been called in to help with the investigation.
The Sheriff’s office of Harris County, Texas has posted a message on its official Facebook page, pleading with people not to fall for a social media prank in which they’re encourage to say “108” to Siri.
That’s because the number prompts Siri to dial 9-1-1, or the emergency phone number of whichever country they are in at the time.
While some law enforcement agencies use hackers to try and break iPhone encryption, detectives in the U.K. found a simpler solution: mugging suspects before they get the chance to lock their phones.
Three men broke into an Apple campus building in Cupertino this morning, prompting Silicon Valley law enforcement to conduct a huge manhunt for the burglars.
Sheriff’s deputies and police officers went door to door through the Cambrian Park neighborhood of San Jose in an effort to find the suspects, who were spotted by Apple security breaking a glass door of the building in the early morning hours.
The Santa Clara County Sheriff’s office is reportedly investigating a dead body that was found at Apple’s headquarters this morning in one of the company’s conference rooms.
Details on the investigation are limited at this time and it is not known if the death is suspicious or if it resulted from natural causes.
iPads may be used professionally everywhere from the cockpits of airplanes to schools to the dugouts at MLB games, but not every scheme to employ Apple’s tablet works out quite so well.
According to a new report, a plan to provide around 20,000 iPads to London’s Metropolitan Police Service in the U.K. has failed to materialize — despite $8.6 million spent developing custom software, licenses and training.
Criminals don’t just have to worry about someone finding their drug stashes anymore, as police have started to employ highly trained, electronics-sniffing dogs to root out illegal material on USB thumb drives and SD cards.
Only five dogs have acquired this particular set of skills that can make them a nightmare for cybercriminals and child pornographers.
Whichever side of the political equation you fall, there’s no denying that complaints about police brutality are all over the news at the moment.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California thinks its got the solution, however: a new Mobile Justice CA app, designed to help individuals track and record misconduct among law enforcement officers.
A protest involving around 50 people blocked customers from entering the main doors of Apple’s flagship San Francisco Union Square retail store yesterday.
The protest was related to service employees claiming to be underpaid. Organized by the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), they staged a sit-in for nearly an hour. While the Apple Store remained opened during this time, customers had to enter through a side door.
One of the protestors, describing himself as an Apple security guard, decried the firm for its lack of job protection. “If [security officers] miss a day of work, they don’t know if they’ll have the job the next day,” he told Business Insider.
A New Zealand father-and-son duo tracked down their stolen iPad using the device’s “Find My iPad” function.
After enjoying a meal in a restaurant in Nelson, New Zealand, Chris and Markham Phillips returned to the parking lot to find their car had been ransacked — and cash, glasses and an iPad were missing.
“As despair and disgust begin to kick in, we remember a newly installed tracking application on both the stolen iPad and the retained iPhone,” son Markham told a local reporter. “We fire up the app [and] the iPad icon pings onto the map.”
When University of Michigan medical student Paul DeWolf was shot to death earlier this year, police had few leads.
That all changed when a stolen MacBook Air revealed a key piece of information — and helped police track down the alleged killers.
The security features built into Apple’s iOS software are so good that the police are unable to gain access to defendant’s iPhones when they need to. Apple itself is able to bypass the security software and decrypt locked devices — and it do so when the police request it. But the company has so many requests that it has to add police to a lengthy waiting list.
Apple devices are a popular target for the thieves of New York, so much so that the NYPD now has a team of cops dedicated to recovering stolen iPhones and iPads, according to the New York Post. Every time an Apple device is stolen, detectives work with the Cupertino company to identify their location and then recover them.