I mean, we know they can be used as evidence against you, but what if I was actually just chilling and watching Youtube videos at home? Can my spying piece of shit phone ironically save me? 🤔
The prosecution lawyer is going to argue that evidence could have been faked. Then it comes down to how convincing the jury find that argument. Personally I’d say that you could have been using a VPN to make it appear that you were accessing Youtube from home or that you left your phone at home and just left Youtube auto playing or ran some sort of automation to search for and play videos.
Well no, because all those phone records show is that someone was using your phone at your house during x times to watch videos. There is no verification that it’s actually you. Now, if we actually had face tracking technology to see whether or not you’re actually watching ads, that could change. But as for right now, no.
Crimes are (ostensibly) supposed to be proven beyond doubt, so yes, it can be (and often is, I work for a telecom) used evidence, for both prosecution and defence.
I remember a streamer faked a stream to murder his girlfriend/ex-wife. His alibi did not work.
McCullagh eventually admitted to authorities that the live stream was not recorded on the night of McNally’s death. McCullagh also allegedly left his phone in McNally’s house after her murder.
Dude got scared in the interrogation and fessed up. Lmfao, if you can’t withstand being berated in a police interrogation, maybe don’t do a murder. Also, leaving your phone in a crime scene is like the nail in the coffin.
You don’t need an alibi. You don’t need to provide evidence. You are presumed innocent. The cops need to prove you guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
Unless you’re in the US, then you’re fucked.
Had me in the first half
What you really need is to live in a country with super aggressive CCTV. Then proof is literally around every corner
I love this question.
The police would say, in my opinion, that the phone being somewhere was evidence if they needed it to be and say that it didn’t prove the owner was there if they didn’t want it to be useful.
You are completely right, but I would hope the defense would submit it as evidence.
Do you not understand the concept of a defence attorney? It’s not just the police that decide what is and isn’t evidence.
Does the defense attorney go out to the scene, conduct interviews, photograph items of interest, or secure custody of any evidence gathered?
It’s the police that decide what is “evidence” and attorneys argue over what they found later. A good attorney might go out and look for some of those things after the fact, but the vast majority will not. You either gather your own evidence or roll the dice with the police actually doing their jobs.
Are you seriously suggesting a police force will not secure a murder suspect’s phone as part of their enquiries?
Or that, if they didn’t, this would work against them in court later?
Im suggesting that police will find the evidence that best fits the narrative they’re trying to portray. If the phone helps their case, sure. If it doesn’t, or contains evidence to the contrary, there’s a decent chance it’ll get “accidentally” misplaced if it’s even collected at all. They’re out to prove your guilt, not suggest your innocence.
You act like police never withhold or tamper with evidence. The persons point was that police have an inherent advantage because they get the first look at evidence, for a good long while, until it’s turned over to any defense team.
Which is part of the reason the burden of proof is on them.
if you have that, there’s probably location data and signin/unlock events that would tell a more compelling story. Especially if you use biometric unlock.
Twist: The videos were all about how to get away with murder.
It wouldn’t exonerate you, unless you could prove beyond a doubt that it was you using the phone. It’d be easy, if you were planning a murder, to give an accomplice your phone and have them use it all night to cover for you. It might be able to be used in conjunction with other evidence, though, to assist in your defense.
Wrong, that’s the opposite of how reasonable doubt works. It is the prosecutor’s job to prove beyond doubt that the defendent is guilty of the charges. The defendent does not need to prove they are innocent.
If the prosecutor can’t prove that the defendent is lying about the alibi, then they’ve failed at their job.
That’s how it’s supposed to work but rarely actually does.
It’s how the subway vigilante who choked an unstable yet unarmed homeless black man was acquitted.
It’s like saying you couldn’t have committed a crime because your TV was on at the time; it seems too flimsy to even be usable if you didn’t have some other form of evidence supporting that it was actually you using it to go along with it. I’m not a lawyer, so it’s possible I’m totally wrong, but surely no competent lawyer would expect that to work and no judge would take that as evidence on its own merits.
it seems too flimsy
Okay, then the cops will have no problem proving you were elsewhere at the time, if its a lie. Until they’ve proved it and convinced a jury of that, you’re 100% innocent.
Seriously, it’s not your concern as a defendent to prove your innocence. If they can’t prove you’re lying about such a flimsy alibi, then what kind of case could they possibly have against you anyway?
The question wasn’t, “Could this be used as evidence?”, it was “Would this exonerate you?”
Maybe we’re answering two different questions, but I don’t see this being enough to exonerate anyone without some supporting evidence to go with it.
Are you sure? Sounds like how it used to be, you know, before people were taken off the streets by masked men.
The commenter is still completely wrong, then. In that case there is no due process and you’re just guilty because people with guns say so.
It’s more that it’s evidence that a reasonable person could doubt. It’s the prosecutors job to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. The defense needs to convince a reasonable person that you might not have done it.
If there’s other evidence phone location and activity data could be argued to be faked, but in isolation a reasonable person could doubt that someone faked their phone activity and location.The court isn’t interested in exonerating people, it’s only interested in arguments supporting guilt and finding holes in them. It’s why they don’t find you innocent, only “not guilty”. You don’t argue that you’re innocent, you argue that the reason they say you’re guilty is full of holes.
Depends on how bad the cops want to pin it on you.
If they’re on your ass hard, they’ll ignore exculpatory evidence. Since only YouTube playing isn’t concrete enough to guarantee much of anything about where you were, it’s definitely not going to satisfy them without more.
Even the phone itself being in you home the entire time isn’t definitive proof you were there.
There’s not even a guarantee you could establish reasonable doubt with every record of your phone being available, so you can’t pin your hopes on a jury either.
Hell, you could be on a call from a landline, and that isn’t sure fire proof you were at home. It’s better than a cell call, but there’s ways to fake being at home over landline if someone is determined enough.
It isn’t impossible though. You get the right investigators, they verify that your device was at home, and everything else is consistent with you being there, you could get bumped way down the list for their focus. Mind you, if every other possible suspect is then cleared, they’ll come back to you.
The police have nothing to do with it. They aren’t used to obtain records, that’s done through the legal system like court orders
You do know that the cops are the ones that do the legwork, right? That most prosecutors rely on them to provide cause to get warrants in the first place. If the cops keep putting the same person forward as their target, that’s who a DA will try to get warrants for, not some other random asshole.
If you can’t convince the cops of your alibi, then chances are good that they’ll keep plodding along at it, regardless of them being right or wrong.
So, yeah, the cops have something to do with it
No, that’s not how it works, the cops have nothing to do with it. You tell your defense attorney that you were watching youtube, your attorney tells the judge you need those records from google, the judge’s court sends a warrant to google inc., then google sends those records to the court.
That’s how it should work.
Nobody with a lick of sense should be telling the police anything at all. Their attorney should. But that’s not what OP asked.
OP asked if the simple fact would be enough to get police off his ass. It wouldn’t be.
But yes, police can absolutely request records with your consent, and do at times. If you’re dumb enough to not have a lawyer in between.
And, they can as part of their investigation, request warrants for the same information. And they do. It has happened. It isn’t a hypothetical. Various law enforcement agencies get warrants for goggle data often enough that it’s no secret.
For your attorney to be asking for a court order for your records would only happen after you were charged. That’s not what OP asked about.
Afaik, Google wouldn’t even hesitate to give your data to your own attorney anyway. They might, just on the basis of them not wanting to play nice, but records like that can be gained by consent. It’s why cops can track cell phones that are yours without cops needing to get a warrant. If you’re agreeing to it, your due process rights are covered.
Again, you aren’t wrong if Google refused to give your attorney the information. They would then need to be forced via court order. But that isn’t the same thing as a warrant. All warrants are court orders, not all court orders are warrants.
Having an attorney means they have power of attorney. A request from them on your behalf is the same as you making the request. If Google resisted that request, and they could cook up some kind of basis for that I’m sure, but the attorney still wouldn’t need a warrant. Their request would be legal.
A warrant is permission from a court to take an action that would otherwise be illegal, and are issued to agents of the court/state (here in the US anyway, I’m not sure about anywhere else) to take actions that violate rights of citizens or other entities without due process. The warrant is supposed to be part of your due process, though they get abused all to hell and back.
It is police that serve warrants though, usually. They aren’t the only ones, and you could argue that any government agent acting on a warrant is de facto police, but chances of a warrant getting executed without some kind of law enforcement officer present are low. Particularly in the scenario OP asked about.
Think about it like this. If I want to get money from my bank account, I can, within the limitations set by my bank (hours of operation, etc). If I want someone else to be able to, there’s formalities involved, such as putting them on the account or granting them power of attorney. POA of that nature means they act as though they are me for a range of legal statuses. I could sign papers to make anyone POA, but the A in that is Attorney, and once a lawyer represents you officially, they have wide ranging ability to act on your behalf in a legal proceeding.
The courts, and by extension the “Justice system” that includes police, prosecutors and other agents, need a warrant if I don’t give permission. But I can give them that permission, sign some paperwork, and their requests for information would be the same as if I made the request.
And that’s what would happen in OP’s scenario where they want to provide an alibi. If you don’t want to clear yourself via YouTube history, that’s a different question entirely. But, once again, in the hopes of preventing this spiraling, OP asked about providing that alibi to the police.
You’re working on the idea of exhonoration being only at trial. Which, it still wouldn’t take a warrant since it’s your lawyer. But I’m working before indictment, when the investigation is still ongoing because that’s when it would first come up for an accused person. The cops say “where were you at X?” You say, “jerking off to anime on YouTube”, and they want to know if that’s true.
For it to reach trial before you bring it up means your lawyer is not doing their due diligence by asking what the fuck you were doing at the time of the crime.
OP didn’t ask what you seem to think they asked
police have nothing to do with it.
Dreamer.
A phone playing a video would not be sufficient to establish that you were at home, but merely that the phone was powered on somewhere. But if YouTube had records that indicated your phone was connecting using an IP address at your home, then the phone’s location could be ascertained.
But that still doesn’t say anything about where you are, since not everyone – even in 2025 – carries their phone every time they leave home.
But if YouTube also registered a Like on a video at a particular time, and it can separately be proved that no one else could be at your house and no one else connected to your home network, and that your phone was not modified in such a way to fake such an action (eg a VPN), then this would be enough circumstantial evidence to convince a jury that you were probably at home.
And if home is nowhere near the murder scene, then this could be a defense.
Maybe. As you can see, a lot of "if"s are needed to string together an alibi, let alone a good one.
Again Dennis? Who was it this time?
There’s nothing to prove that you were home with your phone.
It could certainly be used as evidence in your favor. Whether it by itself would be enough to exonerate you would depend on things like the evidence against you and how much weight the jury gave to your records.
Currently having a dozen eye witnesses does not count as an alibi these days.
Heck, the evidence being broadcast on national television doesn’t count (see recent political arrests)
Tangent: eye witness testimony is the worst kind of testimony.
Soon it might actually become the lesser evil, considering the possibility of deepfakes.
Evidence trustworthiness would be like (from least to most trustworthy):
- Photo/Audio Evidence
- Video Evidence
- Eyewitness testimony
- Eyewitness testimony + the witness was also also recording it at the time
Ahem.
- Photo / audio / video evidence.
- Eyewitness testimony
That the eyewitness was also recording does nothing to change veracity, those are still photo / audio / video and can thus be faked.
Its more like defence against misremembering/misidentifying rather than outright lying. If a witness intends to lie, then like the video portion doesn’t really matter, because neither could be trusted in that case.
