Police Shootings / Possible Abuse Threads [merged]

First time hearing about this geofence
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In January 2020, Florida resident Zachary McCoy received a concerning email from Google: local authorities were asking the company for his personal information and he had just seven days to stop them from handing it over.

Police were investigating a burglary, McCoy later found out, and had issued Google what’s called a geofence warrant. The court-ordered warrant requested the company look for and hand over information on all the devices that were within the vicinity of the broken-into home at the time of the alleged crime.

McCoy was on one of his regular bike rides around the neighbourhood at the time and the data Google handed over to police placed him near the scene of the burglary.

McCoy was in the wrong place at the wrong time – and for that he had now become a suspect of a crime he did not commit.

This was not an isolated incident. From Virginiato Florida, law enforcement all over the US are increasingly using tools called reverse search warrants – including geofence location warrants and keyword search warrants – to come up with a list of suspects who may have committed particular crimes.

While the former is used by law enforcement to get tech companies to identify all the devices that were near a certain place at a certain time, the latter is used to get information on everyone who’s searched for a particular keyword or phrase.

It’s a practice public defenders, privacy advocates and many lawmakers have criticised, arguing it violates fourth amendment protections against unreasonable searches.

Unlike reverse search warrants, other warrants and subpoenas target a specific person that law enforcement has established there is probable cause to believe has committed a specific crime. But geofence warrants are sweeping in nature and are often used to compile a suspect list to further investigate.

There’s also little transparency into the practice. Though many major tech firms such as Apple and Google regularly publish transparency reports identifying the number of requests for user data they get globally, there’s been historically little information on how many of those requests are geofence warrants.

Responding to pressure from advocacy firms like the Surveillance Oversight Tech Project (Stop) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Google broke out how many geofence warrants it received for the first time in 2021.

The company revealed it received nearly 21,000 geofence warrants between 2018 and 2020. The tech giant did not specify how many of those requests it complied with but did share that in the second half of 2020, it responded to 82% of all government requests for data in the US with some level of information.

The company has not published an update on how many geofence warrants it received since then and did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.

Now, Apple has taken steps to publish its own numbers, revealing that in the first half of 2022 the company fielded a total of 13 geofence warrants and complied with none.

The difference? According to Apple’s transparency report, the company doesn’t have any data to provide in response.

An Apple spokesperson did not go into detail about how the company avoids collecting or storing time-stamped location data in such a way that prevents compliance with geofence warrants, but reiterated the company’s privacy principles which includes data minimization and giving users control of their data…..

https://www.theguardian.com/technol...cape-geofence-warrants?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other