Submitted 5 hours ago by DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works to nostupidquestions@lemmy.world
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? 🤔
I love this question.
The police would say, in my opinion, the 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.
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
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.
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.
That’s how it’s supposed to work but rarely actually does.
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.
Are you sure? Sounds like how it used to be, you know, before people were taken off the streets by masked men.
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.
I remember a streamer faked a stream to murder his girlfriend/ex-wife. His alibi did not work.
dexerto.com/…/youtuber-reportedly-faked-gta-lives…
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.
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.
What you really need is toive in a country with super aggressive CCTV. Then proof is literally around every corner
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, 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.
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.
Again Dennis? Who was it this time?
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)
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.
Tape the phone to your cat or something so the tumbler is seeing some action. Otherwise it’s just a phone laying on a surface playing videos.
Pre-record the live stream, brb chat, gonna do an assassination. /s
You’d have to prove it was not only you watching them, but that they were watched somewhere other than the crime scene. I mean, it’s entirely possible to run YouTube on your phone while you’re killing someone. Or be running YouTube at your home while you’re not there.
Not unless you can prove that it was you that was watching those videos, no.
Aggravationstation@feddit.uk 10 minutes ago
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.