Before April 20, it was easy to feel fungible as an associate. The hours were long. The tasks were menial. The ingenuity in cases came from senior members of the legal team -- lawyers whose decades of experience taught them how to develop the complex, creative factual and legal arguments that eventually won the case. Sure, associates tended to be technologically savvy, but that ultimately was more parlor trick than substantive help to the case.
But on April 20, the technology gods evened the playing field. On that fateful day, lawyers learned that many of the most commonly used smartphones appear to track their owners' locations.
Although the details are still emerging, here is what we know, from an April 20 article from the technology website O'Reilly Radar: A software "glitch" in the Apple iPhone and perhaps other smartphones results in the phone's location being tracked and stored in a data file on the phone. Unless the smartphone is "jailbroken" (don't ask if you don't know) or the software hasn't been updated in a year or more, there is no way to enable or disable the tracking feature; if the phone is on, location tracking is on.
The data file is highly detailed -- early reports suggest that the tracking file is updated erratically but frequently enough to meaningfully track the owner's movements. The data file is stored on the phone in an unencrypted format and is so easily decipherable that multiple programs already have been developed (at least one is available for free on the internet) to plot the data from the tracking file onto local, regional, or national maps to facilitate the analysis of the data. If the smartphone is backed up to a computer, a copy of the tracking file exists on the computer, as well.
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Source: law.com
By: Kip Mendrygal
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