Google Gives Feds 1,500 Phone Locations In Unprecedented ‘Geofence’ Search

[steven36]

Two dead dogs and more than $50,000 in damaged property were just some of the casualties of arsons carried out across Milwaukee, Wisconsin, throughout 2018 and 2019.

 

Google keeps historical locations of users, and police are taking advantage to find all kinds of criminals.

 

To find the perpetrators, officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) demanded Google supply records of user devices in the respective locations at the times the arsons took place, Forbes has learned. Though federal agents had used the technique before, they’d never received such a data haul back from Google.

 

The requests, outlined in two search warrants obtained by Forbes, demanded to know which specific Google customers were located in areas covering 29,387 square meters (or 3 hectares) during a total of nine hours for the four separate incidents. Unbeknownst to many Google users, if they have a “location history” is turned on, their whereabouts are stored by the tech giant in a database called SensorVault.

 

In this case, Google found 1,494 device identifiers in SensorVault, sending them to the ATF to comb through. In terms of numbers, that’s unprecedented for this form of search. It illustrates how Google can pinpoint a large number of mobile phones in a brief period of time and hand over that information to the government. Previous Forbes reporting has shown searches across far wider areas.

 

To investigators, this kind of “geofence” demand is useful, allowing them to go through the data trove provided by Google, look for devices of interest such as a known suspect’s phone and ask for more personal information on the user of that mobile.

 

Privacy concerns

 

But it's also the kind of search that's been making pro-privacy folk anxious over the last year. Such data grabs, also referred to as “reverse location searches,” see the police give Google a timeframe and an area on Google Maps within which to find every Google user within. Google then looks through its SensorVault database of user locations, taken from devices running the tech giant’s services like Google Maps or anything that requires the “location history” feature be turned on. The police then look through the list, decide which devices are of interest to the investigation and ask for subscriber information that includes more detailed data such as name, email address, when they signed up to Google services and which ones they used.

Google supplies the government with "anonymized" user data on users within and around a bank at the time of a robbery. In this case, investigators asked for identifying information on all six users and Google provided it.

 

It’s unclear whether or not Google handed over any identifying information, but to Jerome Greco, a public defender in the Digital Forensics Unit of the Legal Aid Society, it’s a sign that geofence warrants are overly broad and endanger user privacy. 

 

“The number of phones identified in that area shows two key points,” he tells Forbes. “One, it demonstrates a sample of how many people’s minute-by-minute movements Google is precisely tracking.

 

“Two, it shows the unconstitutional nature of reverse location search warrants because they inherently invade the privacy of numerous people, who everyone agrees are unconnected to the crime being investigated, for the mere possibility that it may help identify a suspect.”

 

The ATF, which filed the search warrants in Wisconsin, said it couldn’t comment on ongoing investigations. Neither of the two suspects named in the warrants have been charged in federal court at the time of publication. As for its use of Google geofence searches, a spokesperson said: “To ensure the safety of our special agents and other law enforcement partners with whom we work, ATF does not release information regarding certain law enforcement techniques to the public.”

 

Richard Salgado, Google director of law enforcement and information security, said the company had processes to look through government requests and ensure customer privacy was protected. “We only produce information that identifies specific users when we are legally required to do so,” said Salgado.

 

A bank heist investigation

 

Forbes obtained another search warrant that indicates Google is trying to fight back against overly broad government requests, but still appears to be handing over innocent people’s information as well as legitimate suspect data. 

 

In another a previously unknown geofence search, federal officers wanted Google to share information on devices in the vicinity of a bank robbery in Allenton, Wisconsin, in April this year. Initially, Google deemed the area the government wanted it to search too wide. By pushing back, Google convinced investigators to reduce the search area from a 400 meter radius, to 50 meters.

 

Google then returned phone identifiers for six devices. The government asked for personal details of the individual users for all six, which the tech giant duly provided, including name, email and other Google account use data. Only two suspects, who are currently awaiting trial for that robbery and two others in the state, have been named, indicating innocents’ personal data was disclosed.

 

Guilty until proven innocent?

 

That geofence warrants scoop up innocents’ data has now been proven beyond doubt. In one previous case detailed by the New York Times an innocent man was falsely imprisoned for a week, in part because of the data provided by Google.

 

But Orin Kerr, a professor at Berkeley Law, says that use of innocents’ information is going to be inherent in investigations. Video footage of bank robberies, for instance, will contain images of innocents there at the time, Kerr adds. “Presumably, most people who are on that video are innocent.”

 

If you’re  concerned about being caught up in any dragnet, it’s possible to opt out of Google’s historic location database. To do this, users can go to their My Activity page in their Google account and click on Activity Controls. From there, you can toggle the location history feature off.

 

 

Source

[Karlston]

Feds reap data from 1,500 phones in largest reported reverse-location warrant

The search warrants demanded nine hours' worth of location history from Google.

Enlarge / You're not the only one looking at your phone's location history.

Omar Marques | SOPA Images | Getty Images

Federal investigators trying to solve arson cases in Wisconsin have scooped up location history data for about 1,500 phones that happened to be in the area, enhancing concerns about privacy in the mobile Internet era.

 

Four Milwaukee-area arsons since 2018, as yet unsolved, have resulted in more than $50,000 of property damage as well as the deaths of two dogs, Forbes explains. In an attempt to find the person or persons responsible, officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) obtained search warrants to gather data about all the devices in the area at the time.

 

The two warrants Forbes obtained together covered about nine hours' worth of activity within 29,400 square meters—an area a smidge larger than an average Milwaukee city block. Google found records for 1,494 devices matching the ATF's parameters and sent the data along.

 

While this is far from the first search to demand a wide swath of data in a given geographic location, Forbes notes, this is the highest number of results such a geofenced search has so far produced. Not only is that a whole lot of potentially unrelated data for investigators to sort through, but it's also possible that the search will prove entirely fruitless, as whoever committed the crimes may not have a phone, may not have brought it with them, or may have brought it with them in airplane mode or powered off.

The big net

The concept behind such a request is straightforward: you can't track the phone of a suspect you don't have, but you can start with the time and place the crimes were committed and look to see who was there. With that information in hand, they can drill down, as Forbes explains:

[T]he police give Google a timeframe and an area on Google Maps within which to find every Google user within. Google then looks through its SensorVault database of user locations, taken from devices running the tech giant’s services like Google Maps or anything that requires the “location history” feature be turned on. The police then look through the list, decide which devices are of interest to the investigation and ask for subscriber information that includes more detailed data such as name, email address, when they signed up to Google services and which ones they used.

While the ability to go through data that way might be handy for law enforcement, some privacy experts are not on board. Such a request "shows the unconstitutional nature of reverse location search warrants because they inherently invade the privacy of numerous people, who everyone agrees are unconnected to the crime being investigated, for the mere possibility that it may help identify a suspect," Jerome Greco, a public defender in the Digital Forensics Unit of the Legal Aid Society, told Forbes.

 

Google told Forbes it tries to protect individual users' privacy when it receives such a request, saying, "We only produce information that identifies specific users when we are legally required to do so." The company does have a history of trying to push back on overly broad reverse-location requests, Forbes notes. For example, when federal investigators wanted information on devices in a 400-meter radius around a bank robbery earlier this year, the company convinced them to drop that to a 50-meter radius.

 

Users who disable Google's location history features should, in theory, not have data in Google's SensorVault for the company to pass along to investigators. That said, Google is facing multiple lawsuits, including a potential class-action in the US and a suit by consumer protection regulators in Australia, alleging the company misled users and retained location data even if the setting was turned off.

 

 

Source: Feds reap data from 1,500 phones in largest reported reverse-location warrant (Ars Technica)  

[Karlston]

Similar topics merged.