Google has effectively ended the practice of “geofence warrants,” where Location History in Google Maps could be obtained by law enforcement.
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On Wednesday, Google announced it would soon change the way it would store and access users’ opt-in “Location History” in Google Maps, making the data retention period shorter, and making it impossible for the company to access it. That means it will no longer respond to “geofence warrants,” a controversial legal tool used by local and federal authorities to force Google to hand over information about all users within a given location during a specific timeframe.
Because geofence warrants — also known as reverse-location searches — have the potential to implicate anyone who happens to be in the vicinity of a crime, Google’s decision to end access to location data is a major win for privacy advocates and criminal defense attorneys who have long decried these warrants.
The company confirmed the impact of the change to Forbes. A current Google employee who was not authorized to speak publicly told Forbes that along with the obvious privacy benefits of encrypting location data, Google made the move to explicitly bring an end to such dragnet location searches.
“The repository of everyone’s location data dating back months or years was a hazard, and Google is trying to clean up that hazard,” Jennifer Granick, an attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, told Forbes. “That is a real benefit for people’s privacy for people’s locations over time which is some of the most revealing information about us.”
Armed with facts about a criminal incident, and the vast location history data and associated device data from a geofence warrant, investigators would try to identify a suspect who might have committed a crime.
“These warrants are dangerous,” wrote Jennifer Lynch, an attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, in a Wednesday blog post. “They threaten privacy and liberty because they not only provide police with sensitive data on individuals, they could turn innocent people into suspects.”
The change doesn’t prevent the government from getting information on a specific user by demanding their full account details, the Google employee said. But investigators can no longer hand over some coordinates and a timeframe, and compel Google to give it either identifying data or metadata on all users within those parameters.
The move comes just days after the very first federal appellate court, the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Virginia, heard oral arguments in a case called United States v. Chatrie, where it was asked to evaluate the fundamental legality of geofence warrants. (The court’s ruling, which only would cover five states largely along the eastern seaboard, will likely not come until next year.)
“Good news from Google, I never thought I’d say that,” said Michael Price, one of Chatrie’s lawyers, and the litigation director for the Fourth Amendment Center at the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers.
“From a practical perspective, judges are often concerned about taking a tool away from law enforcement. But here that decision has just been made and may lower the stakes in some respects for finding it unconstitutional.”
Earlier this year, a California state legislator proposed a bill that would have outlawed the practice for California-based companies – notably, Google – to comply with such court orders. (That bill did not advance in the statehouse.) Now, in one fell swoop, Google has now largely taken the decision out of future judges’ hands.
Google doesn’t typically break down how many geofence warrants it receives, though it broke with tradition in 2021, revealing that more than 25% of the warrant requests it had received in the U.S. at the time were reverse location warrants. The volume of geofence warrants received by Google tripled from the end of 2018 to the end of 2019, reaching 3,000 warrants in a single quarter.
As Forbes has previously reported, practically all geofence warrants are targeted at Google, given its vast amount of search and location data. While other tech firms could theoretically be served with similar warrants, public court records nearly always point to a data request from Google over other companies.
While it may receive more geofence demands than any other tech company, it isn’t the only tech giant being told to respond to them. Apple said earlier this year that it had received such geofence requests, but could not provide the data because of the way it protects user locations.
Such warrants have been used in some of the most significant law enforcement cases in recent memory.
They were used to identify those who stormed Capitol Hill on January 6 and to identify individuals involved in the Kenosha riots of 2020 in response to the shooting of Black citizen Jacob Blake. Forbes learned last year that law enforcement were raiding historical Google location data, going back seven years in one case where cops were trying to gather evidence to send two men to death row.
Geofence warrants have also reportedly been used to investigate relatively minor crimes, such as a wallet stolen from a Utah hospital.
The California District Attorneys Association, a state level group that has previously opposed new restrictions on geofence warrants, noted that in 2022, sheriffs deputies in Santa Clara County used the technique to solve “9 separate residential burglaries.”
Similarly, Orin Kerr, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote on X on Wednesday that “from a public policy standpoint, that seems like a bummer.”
“Geofencing has solved a bunch of really major cases that were otherwise totally cold,” he wrote.
“And there are lots of ways of doing the legal process (including Google’s warrant policy, although that’s just one way) that are a lot more privacy protective than ordinary warrants. But I can see why this might be in Google’s business interest. If there isn’t a lot of economic value to Google in keeping the data, and having it means you need to get embroiled in privacy debates over what you do with it, better for Google to drop it.”
