San Francisco: Google knows when and where from a large number of users
Photo: Christoph Dernbach / dpa
The court orders, known in English as "geofence warrants" or "reverse location search", are a popular means for US law enforcement officers to narrow down who was in the vicinity of a crime scene.
How popular they are was revealed on Thursday for the first time by Google.
Accordingly, the company received only 982 such resolutions in 2018, 8396 in the following year and 11,554 in 2020.
In each of these cases, the investigators demand the disclosure of information about the whereabouts of Google users, which the company collects in various ways and combines in a database called Sensorvault.
The prosecutors specify a time period and coordinates for this purpose, and Google must first provide anonymized information about the devices then and there registered.
After the group of potentially suspicious people has been narrowed down on the basis of this information, Google may have to reveal which Google accounts belong to the devices, i.e. email addresses and user names.
The figures published by Google do not show how many of these decisions Google successfully challenged, how many people they affected or how large the coordinates and time periods given by the investigators were on average.
Suspicion of murder based on location data
Google receives the relevant data via its map service Maps, the photo app but also Google search queries - i.e. via various Google services that collect the respective location via GPS, WiFi information and IP addresses.
In 2018, the AP news agency reported that Google still collects location data even if users of its apps deactivated this in the settings.
Google contradicted the specific allegation, but subsequently changed the wording on its help page in order to make it clearer that the option "Deactivate location history" alone is not sufficient to prevent data collection.
Civil rights organizations criticize that "geofence warrants" can turn innocent people into suspects.
In 2019, for example, the New York Times reported on a man who was falsely suspected of murder and detained for six days because, according to a reverse search, his cell phone was near the crime scene.
He subsequently lost his job.
pbe