Google to end ‘geofence warrant’ requests for users’ location data
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New Delhi (Uttam Hindu News): Google has taken steps to end its long-running surveillance practice called “GeoFace Warrants”. This practice allows law enforcement agencies to use Google location data to identify potential criminals.
“Geofence warrants” require a provider like Google to search its entire repository of user location data to identify all users or devices located within a geographic area during a time period by law enforcement.
According to TechCrunch, the use of “geofence warrants,” which people say are unconstitutional, has increased in recent years.
Google announced last week that the Timeline feature in Maps helps you remember places you’ve been and is powered by a setting called Location History.
“If you’re among the subset of users who have chosen to turn on Location History (it’s off by default), your Timeline will soon be saved directly to your device, giving you more access to your data,” the company said. You will also get more control.”
As before, you can delete all or part of your information at any time, or disable the setting entirely.
Google hasn’t directly mentioned “geofence warrants”, but the move will now force police to seek a search warrant to access a specific device instead of asking for data from Google.
Google collects and stores specific user location data in a large database called “SensorVault”.
Google reported several years ago that 25 percent of all warrants it receives each year are geofence warrants.
Police in Minneapolis, US, used geofence warrants to identify individuals participating in protests following the killing of George Floyd in early 2021. For now, at least, we’ll take this as a win, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said in a blog post.
“These changes would appear to make it more difficult, if not impossible, for Google to provide large amounts of location data in response to geofence warrants, a change we have been asking Google to implement for years,” the foundation said.
“This is very welcome news for technology users as we enter the end of 2023,” the EFF said.
In its transparency report in 2022, Apple said it received 13 geofence warrants demanding its customers’ location data, but provided no data.
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