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While not necessarily impartial, your smartphone is quite the observer.
An Alabama man found this out the hard way this week when he was sentenced to 16 years in prison on Monday for killing his wife. Although many factors led to Jeff West’s conviction in November for manslaughter, AL.com, an Alabama news site, reports that data from his smartphone’s health app played a role. role.
West reportedly told law enforcement that he fell asleep around 10:30 p.m. on the night of his wife’s death in 2018. However, according to data from his phone’s health app, he took 18 steps between 11:03 p.m. and 11:10 p.m.
His deceased wife, Kat West, was 42 years old.
This isn’t the first time that health tracker data has been cited in a murder case. In the case of a death in 2016, police relied on the victim’s Apple Watch data to refute the allegations of her accused killer. In 2017, Fitbit data contradicted a man’s story about his wife’s death. Data from the Apple Health app was also used as evidence following a murder in Germany in 2016.
Notably, it’s not just Jeff West’s phone data that seems to contradict his claims. AL.com reports that Dr. Stephen Boudreau, a pathologist with the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences who testified at the trial, concluded that the blow to Kat West’s head was likely not caused by a fall. Instead, he noted that anything that dealt the hit “had an advantage, but it wasn’t sharp.”
A bottle of absinthe was found near Kat West’s body.
The tragic murder of Kat West, and the subsequent conviction of Jeff West, reminds us that our technology is constantly running in the background – a fact the police will not soon forget.
While this may have done justice in Kat West’s case, it’s easy to envision similar data being used in an entirely different way. A man from Gainesville, Fla., Zachary McCoy, has been investigated for burglary simply because location data from his phone put him near a crime scene. (He was taking an innocent bike ride.)
SEE ALSO: Campaigners ask Google to open up on user data shared with police
“I had no idea that by having location services on this site, Google also kept a log of where I was going,” McCoy told NBC News. “I’m sure it’s in their terms of service, but I’ve never read through those text walls, and I don’t think most people do either.”
Law enforcement, however, is undoubtedly familiar with these terms of service – something to remember the next time you head to a peaceful protest.
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