AMES, Iowa — A University of Florida Law School professor, who specializes in internet law and online access issues has been following the updates coming out in the Iowa DCI sports gambling investigation that charged multiple former and current college athletes.

“There’s some really conflicting stories about what the goal of the investigation is because the official line seems to be that the investigation is actually online sports books, like DraftKings,” said Derek Bambauer. “The players, the people who are being investigated, are just means to that and that seems less convincing given they charged a lot of people with crimes.”

Bambauer also questions how the DCI was able to get the data of the areas targeted with a GeoFence.

“The interesting part about it is, you know, how DCI learned about the online gambling that the players were allegedly engaged,” said Bambauer. “Seems like the details are just slowly leaking out and it looks like they either had access to or able to use software that the gaming uses to verify that people are where they say they are.” 

Bambauer is also following a report out by Forbes showing that Google will reduce the amount of data it will retain. That data would be used in law enforcement investigations. The upside is that less innocent bystanders would be investigated.

“Google has historically stored location, history information for all of us in a giant database,” said Bambauer. “Law-enforcement, they have been able to get access to that material with a warrant issued.”

Bambauer said he believes Google is cutting back due to the amount of time it takes to fill all of the law enforcement requests.

“If you’re using a digital device, you leave a breadcrumb with everything that we do online,” said Bambauer. “I think that we have these super-computers in our pockets, we’re also just giving off all this information about what we’re doing, where we are, all sorts of things.”

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