“Querying location data via apps is common in Austria,” explains Stefan Mayer, head of the competence team for missing persons at the Federal Criminal Police Office (BK). Every year, between 10,000 and 12,000 missing person reports are filed with the police in this country.
But what does the search on Snapchat look like? It’s a free app for sending photos and short videos (“snaps”) that disappear by themselves after a few seconds. “Snap-Map” is the name of the function with which the girl from Marseille was able to send her GPS data. Messenger services such as WhatsApp offer similar functions.
Cooperation with providers
If the person they are looking for cannot send their GPS data themselves, the Austrian police depend on good cooperation with providers, most of which are foreign, such as Facebook or Snapchat. However, they are not obliged to take specific actions to locate someone. In practice, it looks like this: “If there is an immediate danger to life and limb, the police can ask the app providers for the location data,” explains Mayer. The request – in technical jargon “emergency request” – is usually answered by the providers within a few hours.
To do this, however, you have to differentiate between GPS and location data: The providers “usually” do not save GPS coordinates of the user with meter accuracy, but only the last saved location. In some cases, the location can also cover a larger radius of a few hundred meters, which e.g. B. in urban areas with several apartments is not much help for the police.
Providers and the police only have access to this data if this is deliberately set by the users in the app.
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