Google hands over user data to US police under geofencing warrant

Geolocation as evidence

Google hands over user data to US police under geofencing warrant

The original of this material

© Forbes.ru08/03/2022, How the US police use the Google service in their investigations

Thomas Brewster

Every year, the American police are increasingly using the so-called geofencing warrant. Google when investigating crimes and collecting evidence. For example, Kansas City cops are using it to access a massive pool of data that they hope will help bring two men to justice for a string of crimes in 2015. Under the infamous warrant, Google is required to provide information about all users who had geolocation enabled in a certain area in a certain period, which potentially affects everyone who is close to the crime scene, not just suspects

Police have used the warrant in cases ranging from arson and robbery to the January 6 protests. Now the geofence warrant could play a decisive role in the case of the two suspects.

In 2015, the Kansas City Police Department was investigating several crimes it believed were related: drug dealing, armed robbery, the murder of a man named Danny Lamont Dean, and the murder of another man named Anthony Dwayne Johnson, who allegedly gave the police information about the first murder. Two were suspected: Sean Burkhalter and Joshua Nesbitt.

Seven years later, Kansas City police and Justice Department prosecutors are still trying to prove that these two men, who were charged in 2018, 2019, and 2021 with drug trafficking, robbery and murder, committed the crimes. The Justice Department wants a death sentence for both men, who deny guilt. At the time of this article’s publication, their attorneys and the Justice Department have not commented.

To gather more evidence that would lead to a conviction and execution, the police turned to Google’s vast treasure trove of geolocation data. According to a geofencing warrant examined by Forbes USA, earlier this year, law enforcement asked the corporation to provide any information about phones that were close to the locations where Dean’s robberies and murder took place. Google provided data on one user who was in at least one of the two locations at the time of the crimes.

It is unclear whether this evidence will prove significant. But if the data proves that one of the suspects was at the scene of the murder, it could determine whether they face a trial and a death sentence. Kansas City Police did not respond to a request for comment.

The warrant not only shows the role that Google data can play in investigating cases, but also raises questions about how long Google keeps the location of the more than a billion people who use Maps every month.

According to the FBI in the geofence warrant request, “Google retains this information indefinitely for accounts created prior to June 2020, unless the user deletes it or chooses to automatically delete their location, browsing and browsing activity. application after three or 18 months.

The order refers to an option that Google introduced in June 2020 that allows users to automatically delete location information in a year and a half. However, for everyone who turned on the definition of geolocation before June 2020 (and many may have done so if, for example, they used Maps), this data is stored forever, unless the user deletes it himself.

When we reached out to the company for comment, Google spokesperson Genevieve Park said that Google does not currently store user location data by default. If he turned on the preservation of the history of movements before the middle of 2020, he needs to turn on auto-delete himself in order for Google to erase this data. “All other users can turn on the industry-first automatic deletion, or wipe all or part of their data at any time,” Park said.

Google said it notified users of policy changes in 2020, but Allan Butler, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, DC, believes Google should have better explained to users who had geolocation enabled prior to this announcement. that their location data will be stored indefinitely. “Google’s new policy doesn’t automatically apply to all accounts over two years old? It’s amazing to me,” Butler adds. “I think applying these changes only to new users is unfair to them.”

Geofencing warrants are not always as accurate or effective as investigators hope, and because of their wide scope, they can target the innocent as well. In 2018 The New York Times reported that the man was wrongfully arrested as a suspect in the shooting because Google data showed that his phone was in the vicinity of the attack.

In recent high-profile cases, police tried to determine which Google users were in the Jan. 6 Capitol Hill crowd, while Kenosha police officers used warrants to determine who was involved in the riot after police shot and killed black citizen Jacob Blake. Forbes discovered at least 13 such warrants relating to events in Kenosha.

Privacy activists have long denounced Plan Intercept searches, with some courts ruling that such warrants are unconstitutional. Earlier this year a Virginia judge saidthat using Google’s geofencing warrants to determine who was present at the scene of a burglary was unconstitutional because it violated the Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution, which protects residents of the country from unreasonable searches. Over the past two years judges in Kansas and Illinois made similar decisions.

Judges’ opinions do not affect how much geolocation data Google has accumulated, or how that data can be used against anyone in court. “We see how important the existence of such data is,” adds Butler. “This data does not disappear into nowhere.”

Translation by Natalia Balabantseva