What Your Wearables Can Reveal

We are currently at a time of full digital immersion. There is an abundance of digital devices such as smart watches and a variety of activity trackers strongly embedded in our lives, that it has become essential to utilize their evidence in legal cases. Fortunately, many countries are updating their legal parameters to address digital evidence. With such reforms taking place in our justice systems, it is a contemporary necessity to be aware of the benefits of applying forensic tools on wearables and to consider the ethics issued when doing so.

In case the term ‘digital forensics’ does not ring a bell to you, let’s start off with familiarizing ourselves with the phrase. According to Techopedia digital forensics is,

“the process of uncovering and interpreting electronic data. The goal of the process is to preserve any evidence in its most original form while performing a structured investigation by collecting, identifying and validating the digital information for the purpose of reconstructing past events.”

In other words, digital forensics is the most modern form of collecting and employing evidence to fight crime in a world that is steadily getting digitized.

Let’s do a little time travel. Imagine yourself in the era of the very first Homo sapiens. One of your neighbours stole the other’s well-carved, ivory flute. The latter pursues the thief to the mountains. The next day, the owner comes back with the flute, rejoicing in his victory. The thief is nowhere to be seen. For a while you wonder about the thief’s fate. As time passes, you forget the incident. You just assume he was murdered by his angry neighbour. No one has the evidence as to if the murder actually happened — I mean who has the tools to go look for, store and analyze evidence? Also, even if the murder did happen, there is no authority to question the incident anyway. So, this event along with many similar ones are left to be buried under layers of time and earth.

Now, travel down the centuries to the 1970’s. One smuggler stole an antique flute, worth a million dollars from another smuggler, who is his enemy. The latter pursues the thief to Brussels where the flute will be sold at an antique fair. In a week, the newspaper reports the murder of the thief. You assume the murderer was the pursuer. You are not satisfied with assumptions since you want to know the truth and advanced science has made the truth readily available for us. Maybe a year later, you read that the thief was killed by his closest friend and not his enemy. The application of analytical techniques on a nanogram of gun powder residue from the gun was all it took to come at this conclusion. You are mind-blown.

Bring yourself back to this moment. Where does forensic science stand today? Of course it has gone far beyond a nanogram of gunpowder. Your neighbour cannot get away with killing a thief anymore since his smartwatch has been tracking every aspect of his physical activities ever since he wore it ( the same goes with any device the murdered party was wearing) . Yes, mankind is finally here in the era of digital evidence. Wearables have seeped into every nook and corner of our lives. These devices can be worn, applied or ingested. They are designed to capture data that includes the owner’s location, sleep patterns, vital signs, distance traveled and at what speed, number of calories burned and so on. The ability of these gadgets to store such a plethora of information has proven them to be a major crime-solving tool for legal authorities.

Take ‘The Lancaster Case’ for an instant. A woman from Pennsylvania by the name of Risley once called 911 reporting about a sexual assault she went through while she was asleep. There was no superficial evidence to be found about this crime. Further investigation, however, brought Risley’s Fitbit to light. It had recorded her GPS and heart rate; none of which had sped up at an alarming rate on the date she mentioned the incident had taken place. This data helped prove that Risley had come up with a fabricated story, which the court immediately dropped once its nature had been proven. Furthermore, it helped to file a case against Risley for false allegations.

Witness testimony, although one main aspect of a court case, is an enabler of false claims. Douglass Detrie was a victim of false witness testimony. He was arrested for the murder of his girlfriend in 2016. Once again Fitbit came to the rescue. Detrie’s Fitbit proved that he was fast asleep during the time of murder. George Burch was convicted of the murder, thanks to his phone proving his location to be the same as that of the location of the crime during the time of murder.

A law firm in Canada managed to use Fitbit data to gain compensation for their client in 2014. She has had an injury at her workplace that had affected her physical activities. Her Fitbit data happened to prove that her newly-acquired injuries had resulted in her being less active than an average woman of her age and profession. The woman received judgement in her favour and she was duly compensated. The opposite of this case is possible as well. Compensation-related companies make use of digital forensics on wearables to deny false claims such as those of health insurances.

Data from wearables can be used to solve puzzles of more varied parameters. An individual’s drug use can be detected by a wearable that measures electrodermal activity, skin temperature and acceleration. In 2019, some investigators of Iowa attempted to locate a missing girl’s whereabouts through her Fitbit data that was synced to her computer. Although the attempt was a failure, it did prove that GPS data acquired from wearables can be used to locate people. What more to say when these devices depict their owners’ accurate time of death on the exact stop of their heartbeat!

Although the benefits of this phenomenon are numerous, we cannot ignore its short-comings. Firstly, there is the issue of acquisition, transportation and analysis of data from wearables. It has become a difficulty due to the lack in the number of research centres or scientific specialists to do the above. Courts are faced with the difficulty of defining discoverable and privileged data; furthermore, the reliability of the data must be proven before testimonies. Then comes the question of admissibility, since certain states and countries still do not accept digital evidence in a court of law. Also, there could be many aspects that tarnish the accuracy of this data. Many wearables depend on direct, reliable connections with satellites to transmit information to produce data. Imagine the state of a device that would have been underground or in a place of unfavourable weather conditions for a long time. Incorrect time-stamps and the fact that the device was kept in the pocket when it was designed ideally for the wrist could further worsen the problem. Furthermore, when the device is not being limited to one user, it may increase the possibility of questioning the reliability and admissibility of these devices.

Finally, there is the question of ethical consideration. At the end of the day, data extracted from wearables are a part of a person’s privacy. Applying digital forensic tools to acquire such data puts that privacy at risk. Great measures must be taken to maintain confidentiality and integrity of this information while ensuring that there is accountability in the actions taken on such information and that it is not misused.

Crime investigations have come a long way from mere assumptions to analyzing digitally-formulated evidence. There is no going back from here. The way forward is surely to find solutions for the drawbacks that digital forensics has challenged us with. Maybe one day we will be able to track a future murderer of a thief who robbed the digital notations of a computer-generated flute by tracking a single tap of his finger on a plasma screen and it is a certainty that that day is not far away.

References

Weerasekera, S. (2019). Digital Forensics & Wearables. Edith Cowan University Joondalup, Perth.