Are Geofence Warrants Headed for Extinction? | Hacker News Reader

Are Geofence Warrants Headed for Extinction?

americanbar.org

48 pointscainxinth12 comments

>> 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.”

Well that only took 7 years. [0]

[0] "first federal [geofence warrant] arrived in 2016"

Sadly, this also means the end of the Google Maps Timeline feature on the website. All location data will only be stored on-device. I really valued the website feature, I would regularly ask Google what restaurant I ate at in Chicago 5 years ago.

Presumably if the location history data is stored on-device in a format accessible to the user, it would not be ridiculously complicated for an existing all-local-data app (such as OSMAnd, which implements an openstreetmap client with locally stored vector map data on Android) to take that same data and overlay it on a map using entirely local resources.

OSMAnd and its competitors are quite useful if you plan to go out to places with really poor or nonexistent cellular coverage, you can easily download the vector data for entire US states or Canadian provinces in advance of your trip.

It certainly seems like in the future there's going to be a market for user-controlled personal-data stores (using a standard format for certain types of data) + library glue to load them into apps on-demand, as that'll be the only way to accomplish features like this in a privacy-preserving way.

Or, you know, the platform companies end up being the only ones who can access the on-device stores from local apps.

> Presumably if the location history data is stored on-device in a format accessible to the user

Except it won't be, because this is Google we're talking about. They'll find some bogus security or privacy reason to keep the data encrypted and inaccessible to end users except through their blessed app, and it will only be transferable through a "backup" feature that's explicitly designed to allow for provisioning new devices without, at any point, giving you actual access to your own data you "backed up".

Like it's with all the other stuff Google manages on Android now.

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 United States v. Chatrie, but that it won't do any good because it was issued under the "good faith" doctrine.

Most warrants are issued by very low-level judges with practically zero thought about the legality. Especially if it's out-of-hours and it's an on-call judge who got the night shift, you're probably getting an Aileen Cannon level of legal sophistication who will sign whatever-the-hell law enforcement shove under her nose. And you're smoked because it was signed in "good faith".

We can only hope :-/

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”.

>I do wish the cases would actually involve harm to people who are “gold star”

I'm really struggling to understand what you're saying here. What do you mean by "people who are 'gold star'"? Which cases are you hoping will harm those people?

I think maybe they're hoping for more sympathetic victims of police abuse.

Unfortunately, the police tend to be pretty thoughtful and discriminatory in whom they target for abuse.

Yeah, sorry my phrasing was crappy - I was indeed meaning “I would like the victims of this to be so overtly innocent that people don’t defend the illegal acts by law enforcement”

yayyyy digital dragnets -_-

"Oh you were in X area during Y crime according to google location data? You are now a suspect"

Reply on news.ycombinator.com