Google Moves to End Geofence Warrants, a Surveillance Problem It Largely Created

upstart writes:

Law enforcement have long tapped users' location data hoarded by tech giants:

Google will soon allow users to store their location data on their devices rather than on Google's servers, effectively ending a long-running surveillance practice that allowed police and law enforcement to tap Google's vast banks of location data to identify potential criminals.

The use of so-called "geofence warrants" have exploded in recent years, in large part thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones coupled with hungry data companies like Google vacuuming up and storing huge amounts of its users' location data, which becomes obtainable by law enforcement requests.

Police can use geofence warrants (also known as reverse-location warrants) to demand that Google turn over information on which users' devices were in a particular geographic area at a certain point in time.

But critics say geofence warrants are unconstitutional and inherently overly broad, since these demands often also include the information of entirely innocent people who were nearby at a time when a crime was committed. Even the courts cannot agree on whether geofence warrants are legal, likely setting up an eventual challenge at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Google's announcement this week did not mention geofence warrants specifically, saying only that the move to store location data on their devices would give users' "more control" over their data. In reality, the move forces police to seek a search warrant to access that specific device instead, rather than asking Google for the data.

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