fWD: Google may have just disabled geofence warrants

This post is migrated from the old Wordpress blog. Some things may be broken.

I may just be posting this one to see how the WordPress ‘Press This’ browser bookmarklet works, but regardless it’s potentially pretty good news for privacy rights in the U.S. and engineering law enforcement to have to remember that the Fourth Amendment exists.

“Google announced this week that it will be making several important changes to the way it handles users’ “Location History” data. These changes would appear to make it much more difficult—if not impossible—for Google to provide mass location data in response to a geofence warrant, a change we’ve been asking Google to implement for years.”

Is This the End of Geofence Warrants? | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Google announced it’s sending Sensorvault to the graveyard. In terms of the various things the company has let die over the years, Sensorvault is one of its Henry Kissinger products, we should celebrate the demise. When a company receives a Geofence warrant it has to divulge the location of every device that existed in a defined location, regardless of how relevant to an investigation it may be. A quarter of these went to Google due to the dominance or Android and how it stored user location data in its Sensorvault database. It’s now allegedly moving this data to be device-stored and have a 3-month expiration, arguably still aimed at not harming targeted advertising, but there would still seem to be multiple wins here.