this post was submitted on 14 Jul 2025
767 points (97.6% liked)

Technology

72933 readers
2768 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.


Our Rules


  1. Follow the lemmy.world rules.
  2. Only tech related news or articles.
  3. Be excellent to each other!
  4. Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
  5. Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
  6. Politics threads may be removed.
  7. No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
  8. Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
  9. Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
  10. Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.

Approved Bots


founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

TLDR: Drug dealers in Catalonia have started to adopt GrapheneOS en masse leading to Catalan police suspecting anyone with a Google Pixel is a drug dealer

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

OK. Owing an iPhone or Samsung also isn't a sign of innocence, it's just a phone, just like a Pixel. There may be a higher incidence of people owning Pixels being drug dealers/traffickers, but there's also likely a lot of people who have them who aren't drug dealers/traffickers, so that fact isn't useful as evidence.

[–] arc99@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

You're getting it the wrong way around. People aren't arrested for the phone they have. This is a complete nonsense by a clickbait article. They are arrested based on observation or intelligence of criminal activity. After the fact, when they are arrested they are found to have one of these phones flashed to use a privacy OS. Do you think such a phone convinces the cops they got the wrong person or not? The answer quite obviously is it convinces the cops this person is a criminal and is attempting to hide what they are up to.

It would be absurd to think cops are staring at people's phones to initiate arrests because they are not.

Whether it convinces the cops isn't nearly as important as whether it convinces a judge/jury. I highly doubt "suspect's phone is too hard to break into" would sway a jury to believe they're a drug dealer.

Cops need to do a proper investigation and prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. The type of phone someone has shouldn't significantly impact any of that, though having a phone they can break into may make that investigation easier.