Are Geofence Warrants Headed for Extinction?

&gt;&gt; <i>On December 13, 2023, Google took matters into its own hands [and] would make three critical changes to how it treats location history information. Its reason? “Your location information is personal. We’re committed to keeping it safe, private and in your control.”</i><p>Well that only took 7 years. [0]<p>[0] <i>&quot;first federal [geofence warrant] arrived in 2016&quot;</i>

I always conceded that Google would have this data, I always told myself you have to trust someone eventually. There was an implicit agreement that they would go to bat if the government came knocking for it. I see now that was a naive perspective on my part. They spent years just handing it over.

This is a good article. It shows that the warrant can be attacked if the reviewing judge follows <i>United States v. Chatrie</i>, but that it won&#x27;t do any good because it was issued under the &quot;good faith&quot; doctrine.<p>Most warrants are issued by very low-level judges with practically zero thought about the legality. Especially if it&#x27;s out-of-hours and it&#x27;s an on-call judge who got the night shift, you&#x27;re probably getting an Aileen Cannon level of legal sophistication who will sign whatever-the-hell law enforcement shove under her nose. And you&#x27;re smoked because it was signed in &quot;good faith&quot;.

We can only hope :-&#x2F;<p>I do wish the cases would actually involve harm to people who are “gold star” - it’s really annoying when I see people going “this is letting people off on a technicality” rather than “the police violated the constitution and in doing so let people get away with criming”.

yayyyy digital dragnets -_-<p>&quot;Oh you were in X area during Y crime according to google location data? You are now a suspect&quot;