The iPhone's healthcare app is used as an important evidence of a rape murder case

In Freiburg, Germany, a 19-year-old woman was murdered after being raped. The important evidence that holds the key to this case has been talked about as a "healthcare" application provided by Apple presented it.

Apple Health Data Is Being Used as Evidence in a Rape and Murder Investigation - Motherboard
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43q7qq/apple-health-data-is-being-used-as-evidence-in-a-rape-and-murder-investigation-germany


Apple's Health app offer key evidence in German rape & amp; murder case
http://appleinsider.com/articles/18/01/11/apples-health-app-provides-key-evidence-in-german-rape-murder-case

A man named Hussein · K of refugees in Afghanistan comes as a suspect of a rape murder case in Germany. The man is under trial from September 2017 on suspicion of dumping the body of the victim woman in the river. However, many of the details were ambiguous at the time of the survey,Age of suspectEven the situation was that I did not know the exact place. The most mysterious thing in this case is that the location of the man at the time of the crime was not identifiable from the location information or the surveillance camera.

K defendant was an iPhone user and refused to cancel passcode when seized the iPhone after the incident, so it was impossible to obtain the location information of the crime time from the smartphone. So the German investigative authorities asked a company in Munich to analyze K defendant 's iPhone, a German press organizationWELTI'm reporting. And the survey company requested to analyze the iPhone seems to have obtained detailed information on "on the day of the crime" on the day of the crime by analyzing the health care application . In the healthcare application, the number of steps walked and what kind of exercise was done are recorded.

byTyler Lastovich

According to the report, the healthcare application records that the accused was "climbing the stairs" at the time of the crime, so that the investigative authorities had told the accused that the accused came to the levee to dump the body to the river It was able to connect. When the Freiburg police reproduced the behavior of the defendant at the time of the crime at the scene of the crime, the data recorded by the health care application was certainly similar to the data of the accused's crime time.


Although it is unknown which iPhone model is involved in the incident, Apple has introduced healthcare applications from iOS 8 and iPhone 6 released in 2014.

The information of the healthcare application is stored only in the local part of the terminal, and it will not be saved on the server on the Apple side. Healthcare information can be backed up to iTunes or saved on iCloud so that it can be checked by other terminals, but it is all encrypted. In other words, even if an investigation warrant has appeared, Apple can not provide what kind of data was stored in the health care application.

This is also specified on Apple official healthcare related pages.

iOS - Healthcare - Apple (Japan)
https://www.apple.com/jp/ios/health/

If your iPhone is locked with a passcode or Touch ID, your health and fitness data in your healthcare application will be encrypted with passcode except for the medical ID. Your health related data will be kept up to date automatically by iCloud on all your devices, but the data will be encrypted both while communicating with iCloud and saving on iCloud.

However, if HealthKit for third parties is enabled, it is theoretically possible to acquire data collected by third party applications. Also, according to Sean O'Brien, a security researcher, he says that if this type of data is stored on the cloud, it will be more easily accessible.

In addition, "In my opinion software creators and distributors should first be responsible to users, the time and place to deliver data to the court is a more complicated problem. In my opinion , It would be much better not to collect such monitoring data at all or it is best to store these kind of data only locally on the device as much as possible.When these data are collected If you do, people who handle it will be responsible for protecting the privacy of the user. "

Even if the law catches up with the progress of the data collection application and the court stops handling the collected data as evidence, monitoring big data is really a big problem. If rules and regulations change, what is currently protected may be threatening someone tomorrow. Michael Kuwett, a security expert, said, "We need to keep products to the utmost and provide products that will truly protect customer's privacy ahead of personalizing big data," I mentioned.