Google to cease disclosing to law enforcement the identities of users in close proximity to a crime
Google’s parent company, Alphabet Inc., is modifying its Maps feature to prevent access to users’ personal location histories. This change will hinder the company’s ability to comply with law enforcement requests for data on individuals present near a crime scene.
Google is changing its location history feature in Google Maps, according to a blog post published this week. The feature, which Google says is turned off by default, helps users remember where they’ve been. The company said Thursday that the location data of users who have turned it on will soon be stored directly on users’ devices, preventing Google from seeing it and also preventing law enforcement from being able to demand that data from Google. .
“Your location data is personal,” said Google Maps product director Marlo McGriff in a blog post. “We’re committed to keeping it safe, private and under your control.”
The change comes three months after Bloomberg
A Businessweek investigation found police officers across the U.S. were increasingly using warrants to obtain location and search data from Google, even in non-violent cases and even for people who had nothing to do with a crime.
“The time has passed,” said Jennifer Lynch, general counsel for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that advocates for digital civil liberties. “We’ve been calling for Google to make these changes for years, and I think it’s great for Google users because it means they can take advantage of features like location history without having to worry about the police getting access to all that information.”
Google said it will roll out the changes gradually over the next year to its Android and Apple Inc.’s iOS mobile operating systems, and that users will be notified when the update hits their accounts. The company won’t be able to respond to new geofencing promises after the update is complete, including people who choose to store encrypted backups of their location data in the cloud. “It’s a good win for privacy and sets an example.” said Jake Laperruque, deputy director of the Security and Surveillance Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology. The move confirms what location data privacy advocates have long argued in court: that just because a company may hold data as part of its business, that doesn’t mean users have agreed that the company has the right to share the data with a third party.
EFF attorney Lynch said that while Google deserves credit for the move, it has long been the only tech company that EFF and other civil liberties groups have seen respond to geofencing orders. “It’s great that Google is doing this, but at the same time, no one else has stored and collected data the way Google has,” he said. Apple, which also has a Maps app, has said it is technically unable to provide the location data police want.
There’s another type of warrant that privacy advocates worry about: so-called reverse keyword searches, where police can ask a tech company to provide information about people who have searched for a particular term. “Search queries can be very sensitive, even if you’re just looking for an address,” Lynch said.
