There is a difference between recording footage of your front yard and collecting information about activities occurring inside your home. Smart devices may reveal incredibly personal aspects of someone’s lifestyle, routines and behaviour.
Your home likely holds many secrets. Each day, it gathers an incredible volume of information about you and others who enter it. Whether you use a video doorbell, smart locks, security cameras or a voice assistant like Alexa, your home likely keeps a log of each time a door opens or closes, each time someone arrives or leaves, each time someone interacts with a voice assistant, or each time someone enters your home.
Most of this is for your own benefit. Convenience, safety and home automation are all reasons why we add these connected devices to our homes. Yet in today’s world of high-tech law enforcement investigations, even the most innocent-looking smart-home data can become evidence of a crime.
Manbir Nirwal, a criminal lawyer with Nirwal Law in Brampton, Ontario, says the growing amount of digital information generated inside our homes creates new considerations for criminal investigations and defence. A device installed to make everyday life easier could eventually help establish a timeline, challenge someone’s account of events or provide information that becomes relevant to a criminal case.
Your Home Creates a Digital Timeline of Activity
Using a hypothetical scenario, let us illustrate how easily a combination of smart-home devices can be used to create a detailed digital timeline of events within your home:
- A video doorbell camera records someone arriving at your home at 10:17 p.m.
- A smart lock registers some sort of activity, which could be someone entering or exiting your home, a short period of time after arrival.
- Your voice assistant, such as Alexa, logs an interaction at 10:31 p.m.
- Another connected device inside your home indicates some form of activity at 10:45 p.m.
- A neighbouring camera records someone leaving a nearby residence shortly before midnight.
While none of the individual pieces of data provided above would prove anything in terms of establishing a sequence of events, collectively, they provide investigators with the opportunity to develop a very detailed timeline of events that took place in your home during the hours in question.
Smart-home evidence is unique because each individual piece of data collected by the various devices in your home appears relatively innocuous. However, once all the data is compiled, it begins to paint a larger picture.
For example, a smart lock indicating that someone entered your home is significant. Add that to a video doorbell that recorded someone at the front entrance just a few minutes earlier, along with additional data from other connected devices, and you begin to get a clearer picture of what was happening at your home.
Alexa Doesn’t Have to Hear a Confession
If you ask yourself how Alexa becomes evidence, you probably envision Alexa accidentally capturing someone confessing to a crime while they’re talking to it.
In reality, Alexa doesn’t work that way. Research related to digital forensics involving Amazon Alexa suggests that information maintained by Alexa, such as interaction history and other types of data, can potentially be useful as forensic evidence.
Timing Can Make All the Difference
Let’s assume an investigator asks a suspect when they went to bed last night. The suspect answers, “At 11 p.m.” The investigator then reviews the available smart-home data and discovers that the suspect’s voice assistant logged a command at 12:15 a.m.
This may not directly establish that the suspect was awake, but it could indicate that someone interacted with Alexa after the suspect claimed to have gone to sleep. That could potentially call the suspect’s account into question.
Likewise, if someone told investigators that nobody visited their home the previous night, yet their smart lock or video doorbell showed somebody visiting, investigators may have evidence that calls the person’s account into question.
Device Data Can Also Support an Accused Person
Devices in your home aren’t always going to produce incriminating data. Sometimes, the data produced by these devices may actually support an accused person’s defence.
Perhaps a security camera shows that someone left the neighbourhood well before investigators thought they did. Maybe device activity supports an alibi. A timestamp could undermine an investigator’s original timeline.
Ultimately, technology produces information. The key question is: What does that information really mean?
Your Doorbell Camera Can See Other Crimes
Another interesting aspect of smart-home video doorbells is that they can see more than visitors. The angle of view, range and sensitivity of your video doorbell will determine how much activity it sees.
Based on its configuration, it can capture images of pedestrians walking down the sidewalk, neighbours walking up to visit, delivery personnel dropping off packages, cars driving along the road and even activity occurring on adjacent properties.
Now imagine an assault takes place several doors down from your home. Investigators start looking for cameras and identify four homes with video doorbells near the scene.
One camera captures the perpetrator approaching the area. Another captures part of the altercation. A third records a vehicle fleeing the scene. The fourth confirms when the perpetrator departed.
Crime scenes often lack witnesses. Thanks to residential areas filled with video doorbells, however, a crime can sometimes be reconstructed using video captured by homeowners who had no connection to the incident.
Privacy Concerns With Smart Homes
Where things get tricky with smart-home evidence is privacy.
There is a difference between recording footage of your front yard and collecting information about activities occurring inside your home. Smart devices may reveal incredibly personal aspects of someone’s lifestyle, routines and behaviour.
Privacy protections vary greatly depending on where you live. In the U.S., the Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures. Section 8 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms offers similar protections in Canada.
Courts continue to grapple with how traditional privacy protections apply to devices that can generate enormous volumes of information about people’s lives.
A notable American example is Carpenter v. United States. The U.S. Supreme Court examined historical cellular location records retained by wireless carriers. The Court recognized that location records can be highly revealing and held that the government generally needs a warrant to obtain the type of historical cell-site location information at issue in the case.
Technological differences aside, the same basic question applies to connected homes: How should ordinary digital data be handled when it has the ability to disclose intimate details about an individual’s life?
Connected Devices Can Create Compelling Forensic Evidence
Canadian courts have grappled with similar privacy issues.
In R. v. Reeves, the Supreme Court of Canada considered the seizure of a shared computer after the accused’s spouse consented to police taking possession of it. The Court concluded that one person sharing a computer could not waive another person’s Charter rights. The Reeves ruling demonstrated the significant amount of personal information contained in modern electronic devices.
More recently, in R. v. Bykovets, the Supreme Court considered the privacy implications of IP addresses. The Court looked beyond an IP address as a simple string of numbers and considered what it could reveal when combined with other information.
The implications for smart homes are clear. Individual pieces of information generated by connected devices may appear insignificant. When combined with video footage, location information and user account logs, however, investigators may be able to develop a much more complete picture of what transpired.
Data Stored Outside Your Home Can Become Relevant
Another complicating factor is that you may not store your smart-home data locally.
Many smart-home products use remote cloud-based storage managed by technology companies. In addition to local device records, investigators may therefore seek access to videos, logs and other information stored on company servers.
Obtaining remote data may involve warrants, production orders, subpoenas or other forms of legal authorization, depending on the jurisdiction and circumstances.
These factors make the way investigators obtained their evidence important for the defence. A criminal defence lawyer may need to determine exactly what investigators obtained, where it came from, what legal authority was used to obtain it and how investigators connected that information to the alleged offence.
Digital Forensic Evidence Can Look More Reliable Than It Actually Is
Humans tend to trust computers.
Hearing someone say, “I think he arrived around 9:45,” sounds vague. Seeing an electronic record showing “9:42:17 p.m.” appears precise.
Precision can sometimes give us confidence that we don’t deserve.
Was the device’s clock accurate? Who had control over the account? Could multiple people access it? Was it possible for the device to be activated remotely? Was an action performed manually or through programming? Did the device capture every moment of an incident?
Most importantly, can investigators determine who triggered the recorded activity?
Consider another hypothetical example. A smart lock produces a record showing that someone opened your front door at 9:42 p.m.
The record may demonstrate that your front door opened at approximately that time.
It does not demonstrate who opened it.
That distinction could be particularly important in a criminal trial.
Evidence From Your Smart-Home System May Defend You
Smart-home records can also help defend against accusations.
Assume someone claims you were present at a particular location when an offence took place. Your doorbell camera could document you arriving back at your house miles away. Your smart garage door could provide another record of your arrival. Security cameras elsewhere on your property could provide further evidence that you were home.
Smart-home records can also reveal errors in eyewitness testimony caused by stressful situations, rapidly changing events or poor recollection.
Identifying relevant digital evidence early in a case can be crucial. Certain digital records may eventually be erased, deleted or become inaccessible. Having access to them could significantly affect how the evidence is interpreted.
The Modern Home Has Introduced Something New: Data
Historically, investigators gathering evidence at crime scenes inside homes relied primarily on physical evidence and statements from people who were present.
Advances in smart-home technology are changing that.
Doors open. Cameras detect movement. Commands are given to voice assistants. Security systems change status. Devices connect to and disconnect from networks.
Each event can leave behind some type of digital footprint, even if that footprint initially appears insignificant.
As this technology continues to evolve, criminal cases will increasingly involve questions about how digital evidence was acquired, how reliable it is and what conclusions can reasonably be drawn from it.
Law enforcement now has new sources of evidence. Defence lawyers have new opportunities to contest investigative timelines and uncover digital evidence that supports their clients’ versions of events. Courts will continue defining the limits of privacy as new technologies become commonplace inside our homes.
Most people purchase video doorbells so they can see who is at their front door. They purchase smart locks so they can unlock their doors using their phones. Very few people anticipate that these devices could someday become important evidence in determining guilt or innocence.
Yet as our homes become smarter, the home itself may become one of the most important witnesses to what happened inside it.
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