The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history

# · 🔥 650 · 💬 310 · 2 years ago · www.theguardian.com · DamnInteresting · 📷
The evidence that cast him as a suspect was his location during his bike ride - information the police obtained from Google through what is called a geofence warrant. Geofence location warrants and reverse search warrants such as the ones McCoy dealt with are increasingly becoming the tool of choice for law enforcement. Google revealed for the first time in August that it received 11,554 geofence location warrants from law enforcement agencies in 2020, up from 8,396 in 2019 and 982 in 2018.It's a concerning trend, argue experts and advocates. "They're coming up with everything they can to do their job. That's all it takes for the next type of [reverse] search warrant to come about." For keyword search warrants, another relatively new mechanism to obtain user information that has emerged, anyone who searched for a certain phrase or address becomes a suspect. The latter is potentially more far-reaching than geofence warrants, Kenyon argues, because keyword search warrants are not necessarily geographically or tangibly tied to a specific crime and could make suspects out of people around the world who happened to search for specific terms. "You could use a pretext to get a reverse search warrant targeting an abortion provider's location, using literally any other law on the books, and then provide that information to activists," Cahn said.
The new warrant: how US police mine Google for your location and search history



Send Feedback | WebAssembly Version (beta)