This is the best summary I could come up with:
In January 2020, Florida resident Zachary McCoy received a concerning email from Google: local authorities were asking the company for his personal information and he had just seven days to stop them from handing it over.
McCoy was on one of his regular bike rides around the neighbourhood at the time and the data Google handed over to police placed him near the scene of the burglary.
It’s a practice public defenders, privacy advocates and many lawmakers have criticised, arguing it violates fourth amendment protections against unreasonable searches.
Responding to pressure from advocacy firms like the Surveillance Oversight Tech Project (Stop) and the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Google broke out how many geofence warrants it received for the first time in 2021.
“We know [geofence warrants] are a ubiquitous policing tool, and as long as companies make it possible to comply with these sorts of court orders, they’re putting their users at risk,” Fox Cahn said.
In the mean time, geofence warrants continue to upend people’s lives, especially as public defenders and attorneys are still learning what these legal requests are – and how to fight them.
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