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? 🤔
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
I’d say not only the videos, but also the rest of your browsing history, and comment history, etc. If you can prove with a timeline that what you were doing was in line with the rest of your behavior that week, it’d be some strong evidence in your favor.
I don’t need a jury of my peers judging my comment history. I’ll just take the guilty plea, thank you.
I hope you feel really ashamed of this comment! And all your other comments kind stranger!
It is a piece of evidence. The jury would decide how much weight to put on that evidence. Depending on other factors, the jury could decide it is compelling and provides reasonable doubt, or, they could decide it is not compelling and disregard it and look at all the other evidence regardless of this particular bit.
Edit to add: Prior to trial there is a jury of one, the prosecutor. There is a chance that the prosecutor will find that evidence compelling and not even bring charges, or dismiss them if they were already brought.
I love this question.
The police would say, in my opinion, that 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.
To make matters more complex, if I were to murder someone I would leave me phone at home, maybe leave it playing videos. It would be much less likely that my phone is randomly at the house of someone who was just murdered if I am truly innocent. That alone does not prove me guilty, of course, but it sure doesn’t look good.
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. A good attorney might go out and look for some of those things after the fact, but the vast majority will not. You either gather your own evidence or roll the dice with the police actually doing their jobs.
Are you seriously suggesting a police force will not secure a murder suspect’s phone as part of their enquiries?
Or that, if they didn’t, this would work against them in court later?
Im suggesting that police will find the evidence that best fits the narrative they’re trying to portray. If the phone helps their case, sure. If it doesn’t, or contains evidence to the contrary, there’s a decent chance it’ll get “accidentally” misplaced if it’s even collected at all. They’re out to prove your guilt, not suggest your innocence.
You act like police never withhold or tamper with evidence. The persons point was that police have an inherent advantage because they get the first look at evidence, for a good long while, until it’s turned over to any defense team.
Which is part of the reason the burden of proof is on them.
Attorneys can and do hire independent investigators in the course of their work.
I remember a streamer faked a stream to murder his girlfriend/ex-wife. His alibi did not work.
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.
Don’t, like, bring your phone while doing crime
Yeah, I think the phone is what sunk him.
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.
If you can get logs that show the unlock time and format it was unlocked with. Say fingerprint, and the GPS location/satellites the packets were going through you could theoretically prove you were within that area with the phone. In practice though… Dont know if you could get the location data supenod from the ISP. So it’s probably be on you to acquire the location data using something like googles location data. You can generally check it by going to Google maps, click your icon and choose timeline:
You can tell it to delete that data and set the retention period. Otherwise it will keep it for years if I remember correctly, I reduced mine to a couple weeks.
ran some sort of automation
I clicked this post thinking just this. Also I didn’t read the “falsely”. I was curious if that’s good enough alibi for a real murder. (No murder intended)
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 would absolutely be used as evidence in your favour by your defence though. It’s not conclusive, but it helps.
But you can provide more than one day’s worth of evidence and check how likely that day’s activity fall within your normal viewing habits.
within your normal viewing habits
Im now scared of having to show just mountains of specific soft core fetish porn to a whole room of people and be like “yep. Nightly mate.”
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 to live in a country with super aggressive CCTV. Then proof is literally around every corner
Twist: The videos were all about how to get away with murder.
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.
If the prosecutor can’t prove that the defendent is lying about the alibi, then they’ve failed at their job.
That’s how it’s supposed to work but rarely actually does.
It’s how the subway vigilante who choked an unstable yet unarmed homeless black man was acquitted.
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.
it seems too flimsy
Okay, then the cops will have no problem proving you were elsewhere at the time, if its a lie. Until they’ve proved it and convinced a jury of that, you’re 100% innocent.
Seriously, it’s not your concern as a defendent to prove your innocence. If they can’t prove you’re lying about such a flimsy alibi, then what kind of case could they possibly have against you anyway?
The question wasn’t, “Could this be used as evidence?”, it was “Would this exonerate you?”
Maybe we’re answering two different questions, but I don’t see this being enough to exonerate anyone without some supporting evidence to go with it.
Again Dennis? Who was it this time?
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.
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 (eg a VPN), 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.
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
