New Geofence Warrants Threatens Personal Privacy
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- By Dawna M. Roberts
- Published: Oct 28, 2021
- Last Updated: Mar 18, 2022
New laws regarding personal privacy are in the news often. Personal freedom experts are highly concerned about the effect of a new geofence location warrant that police can use to obtain your whereabouts.
What is Going On?
According to The Guardian, Zachary McCoy, who lives in Gainesville, Florida, received an email from Google in January 2020 that the Gainesville Police Department had requested his user data, and he had only seven days to appear in court and block their release.
The Guardian explains, “McCoy later found out the request was part of an investigation into the burglary of a nearby home the year before. The evidence that cast him as a suspect was his location during his bike ride – information the police obtained from Google through what is called a geofence warrant. For simply being in the wrong place at the wrong time, McCoy was being investigated and, as a result, his Google data was at risk of being handed over to the police.”
The Geofence Warrant Trending
Geofence warrants are becoming the go-to tool for many law enforcement agencies across the country. In August, Google revealed that they had received 11,554 in 2020, an increase of more than 8,300 from the previous year.
Privacy experts and even technology advocates are worried that this trend indicates law enforcement’s lean towards using creative techniques to obtain private user data from devices. There is also a lot of concern about abuse for this method of obtaining information.
McCoy’s defense attorney, Caleb Kenyon, said, “As long as the data exists, all it takes is a creative law enforcement officer to say, ‘Hey, we can get a warrant, or we can send a subpoena for this particular subset of the data that’s already being harvested.’”
“They’re coming up with everything they can to do their job. That’s all it takes for the next type of [reverse] search warrant to come about.”
Other like-minded warrants use general keyword searches to see who looked up certain words online. Privacy advocates argue that these types of tactics violate people’s fourth amendment rights. The Guardian commented that experts warn “against unreasonable searches and seizures. Unlike other kinds of search warrants, which are targeted and seek information about people who law enforcement has probable cause to believe has committed a specific crime, these warrants don’t have a particular person in mind.”
Instead of using these types of warrants to gather evidence on a viable suspect, law enforcement uses them to compile a list of potential suspects and go from there. With tech wearables, there are bound to be many people at the wrong place at the wrong time, creating some false positive suspects where there are none. Anyone whose data shows they were in the vicinity of a particular crime could end up being a suspect and land in court. Experts worry that the problem will be even worse in areas where people are disproportionately targeted by law enforcement.
‘Kenyon argues because keyword search warrants are not necessarily geographically or tangibly tied to a specific crime and could make suspects out of people around the world who happened to search for specific terms. “It’s what I would frame more of as a true digital warrant, without any ties or connections or tethers to the physical world.”’
The worry is in line with Apple’s proposed child sexual abuse material detection (CSAM) feature that is now on hold due to an avalanche of negative press after the announcement they would begin scanning images in iCloud for abuse.
These warrants are paving the way for personal privacy abuse, which does not sit well with the public, nor does it make anyone safer.
