Google moves to end geofence warrants, a surveillance problem it
largely created

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.

https://techcrunch.com/2023/12/16/google-geofence-warrants-law-enforcement-privacy/

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On 2023-12-17, JAB <[email protected]d> wrote:

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.

This kind of thing almost makes you want to move from IMAP back to POP, actually, and ditch webmail altogether.

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.

Seems like it worked pretty well, too, since most idiot criminals appear
to carry their phones with them while committing crimes.

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On Wed, 20 Dec 2023 00:41:48 GMT, Retrograde
<[email protected]d> wrote:

Seems like it worked pretty well, too, since most idiot criminals appear
to carry their phones with them while committing crimes.

Apparently, they did not read the news....

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