Feds Order Google To Hand Over A Load Of Innocent Americans' Locations
Google is facing increased pressure from the U.S. government to share location information, possibly on thousands of innocent people, Forbes can reveal. Thats because of a string of so-called reverse location orders.
Heres how it works: cops send Google specific coordinates and timezones within which crimes were committed. Then Google is asked to provide information on all users within those locations at those times, most likely including data on many innocent people. Those users could be Android phone owners, anyone running Google Maps or any individual running Google services on their cell, not just criminal suspects.
Forbes detailed one such order in August, not long after local media publication WRAL reported on a handful of others in Raleigh, North Carolina.
Now another order has been uncovered in Virginia. And it doesnt contain some crucial limitations to protect innocents privacy.
This fishing expedition infringes on the privacy rights of so many possible people who had the misfortune of being in an area where a crime is alleged to be committed, said Jerome Greco, staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society. We should not allow for such broad access to the data of so many on the mere speculation that a suspect may have used a cellphone near the location of the crime.
Hunting for Androids in Virginia
The most recent order on Google, unearthed by Forbes earlier this week, came from the FBI in Henrico, Virginia. They went to Google after four separate robberies in which unidentified, armed individuals entered and stole from the same Dollar Tree store between March and September this year. The manager of the Dollar Tree was also robbed at gunpoint while dropping off money at a Wells Fargo night-deposit box located just down the road from the store.
The warrant asks for location histories held by Google for anyone within three separate areasincluding regions around the Dollar Tree store and the Wells Fargo addressduring the times and days the five robberies took place. The FBI also wanted identifying information of Google account holders in those areas, two of which had a 375-meter radius. The other had a 300-meter radius.
Google Maps shows that a significant number of residences, shops and restaurants are within the zones outlined in the warrant.
Anyone in those regions who used Google services during those times couldve been ensnared by the data trap. But, for unknown reasons, no records were returned. Forbes couldnt find any charges against individuals named as suspects in the document. Forbes also contacted the prosecutor who signed off on the search warrant, but had not received a response at the time of publication.
Do you think this is a positive practice or a negative practice? Do you think it could implicate otherwise innocent people, and is it worth that risk to find people that might be up to no good? What are your thoughts? ---
I can't be outraged over the surveillance topic again because ever since The Patriot Act, every one of us has had our data and location ethically and unethically possessed by the FBI thanks to ISPs and social media websites. ---
