From the article: "Google says it stopped responding to geofence warrants last year, because the company no longer stores such data and instead keeps location data on each user’s device. But law enforcement has made geofence requests of other tech companies, including Apple, Lyft, Snapchat, Uber, Microsoft and Yahoo"
That explains the changes Google did to the Timeline and why you can't see it in the browser anymore. That is great from them actually.
By stopping that one specific way they supported warrantless surveillance, Google probably managed to make the current round of litigation moot so that Google won't suffer a negative ruling on the merits. They can start all over again in a slightly different way once the attention goes down a bit.
Google moved to finally address this after the press started focusing on how hording location data could put women who visited reproductive healthcare clinics in legal jeopardy.
> Privacy advocates fear Google will be used to prosecute abortion seekers
Google never gets credit for shit like this, or their results in zero-knowledge maths and implementations, which are genuine public service beyond immediate productization.
If Google had decided to move on this back when people first started being falsely accused of crimes based on geofence data, they might be more deserving of credit.
For instance, in 2018:
> Avondale Man Sues After Google Data Leads to Wrongful Arrest for Murder
To be fair... I miss being able to access my location history data via the browser. So it's not a case of "google being evil", it's a case of "sane defaults", "shifting regulations", and "unintended consequences". Google should get the accolades they deserve in this case.
Google doesn't care that their business model is hording data in a manner that puts users at risk from any malicious government official.
They merely bowed to public pressure when the press turned against Google because continuing to horde location data put women seeking abortions in legal jeopardy.
To deserve accolades, they would need to stop hording all the other types of data and adopt a business model not based on spying on everyone as much as possible.
They killed a lot of functionality. For instance, if you opened the details of a place, it used to tell you when all your visits were. I feel the timeline is mostly abandonware these days.
From a factual standpoint it's good to acknowledge that pro-privacy work. From a standpoint of overall evaluating the actions, goals, incentives, and impacts of the company, they mean basically nothing. They are a surveillance advertising company, they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them.
No - they are an advertising company. It is to their advantage to be ahead of the game with something like federated ML if that is where society is headed. To say Google has no positive impact is absurd - engineers there generally care about protecting user data. There is probably better access controls at Google than anywhere else. Sure there are pressures like you said but a gross misplace of user trust is what would destroy them.
they kind of made the game, they are hardly victims here. I shouldn't have to be in a position to decide whether I trust them with a profile of all of my history and activities, especially when I never had an option to opt out, much less opt in.
I am probably far more sympathetic than you can ever imagine but the antecedents are not really unique to google. The technical destination of targeting advertising just looks like this given privacy laws (well the lack thereof).
Like I get it but be mad that congress is a bunch of goofy old people who give zero shits. If you can point at some lobbying by google then by all means so be it - certainly they appeared to have kissed the ring as of late. But keep in mind googlers personally direct money into the eff every year too.
>they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them.
I dislike Google as much as the next guy, but, regardless of its intentions in making Chrome and Android open source and secure, it has a huge positive impact on privacy and human rights.
This is a bizarre take that doesn't account for the impact google has had. Over the last 15 years, Google has steadily and deliberately maximized the commoditization of user data, single handedly driven the adtech industry into an unstoppable enshittification engine, built a moat out of making the internet a much worse place, swung around their money and legal resources to squash small companies, destroyed users lives when they made the mistake of depending on Google for anything important, are enthusiastic participants in global scale political manipulation, censorship, and outright market manipulation.
The purpose of a thing is what it does - android and chrome and everything else Google does serves to maintain or extend their control over the value and flow of user data.
Android and Chrome are net negatives. Google subsumed Firefox, made Mozilla beholden to them, derailed their viability as a competitor to chrome, poached talent, manipulated user exposure, degraded performance targeting competitors, and otherwise engaged in ruthless corporate fuckery to get where they are, with near absolute dominance of the browser market. Android is touted as an alternative to Apple, but they just as enthusiastically build up walled gardens, abuse consumer trust, play into monopolistic market dynamics, empower ISPs and others to force a "you actually rent your device" type model on consumers, and otherwise maximize the amount of money extracted per user without any concurrent return in value.
The internet, smartphones, and browsers are a dystopian, cynical abomination, and if there's any justice in the universe, AI will result in the total dissolution of giant tech companies like Google, and there will be a future free of institutions like it.
They don't get credit for this particular thing because many, many users lost years of their location data in the transition, and most of the rest had theirs corrupted. It was a poorly-executed transition that screwed a lot of people, so even they themselves don't tout it much.
FWIW, I think Google is overly-hated, but it's hard to frame them as a bleeding-heart altruist. Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.
I worked at google some years back, in the VR team for a while. I can't speak to all of google, but at least in that org, the amount of nonsense we had to go through to make sure there wasn't some way some genius could figure something out related to personal information by correlating various pieces of data that we were storing in good faith to improve the product was absurd.
They were trying really really hard to do the right thing. Lots of people really cared about it, many to the point of it being detrimental to just making the product better.
From my time there, a favorite quip of mine, towards some new startup we bought was: welcome to Google, here is a list of every settlement and consent decree you are now subject to.
>Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.
I don't get it. In the first sentence you're claiming that there's "basically no obligation to individual consumers", but when they do a pro-consumer thing, you dismiss it as being "made to cover their own ass". Which one is it? Is this just a lot of words to say that Google isn't as pro-consumer as you'd like it to be?
I don't think Google genuinely does a lot of these things to truly be pro-consumer. One could see these kind of actions as them not wanting to have to deal with the bad publicity of handling all this data that they overall haven't been able to really monetize well anyways.
The truth is probably somewhere in between if you were to actually sit down and talk with all the people involved with such a decision.
Regardless of the reasons though I do think we should give praise to companies and organizations doing things that ultimately benefit us though. We should give feedback as to the changes we like to let decision-makers know people actually do care.
Exactly. A lot of people acted like the attacks on Waymos during the ICE protests were random but they were anything but. All the local organizers are well aware of Google's contracts with ICE as well as the tributes Google paid to Trump.
How is this relevant? Just because you disagree with some vague connection between two entities doesn't give you the right to destroy property. That's the definition of a childish tantrum. Inflicting blind pain on random, unrelated people because you don't get your way.
There's a rhetorical dodge in this argument where it transitioned from talking about property destruction to talking about harming people.
One can cause the other, but the burden of proof is on the claimant that wrecking a mass-produced special purpose autonomous vehicle did more tangible harm to a human being than make some engineer sad before they rolled up their sleeves and built a replacement.
The Waymo emphatically did not care it was destroyed.
Should I be legally allowed to assault you or vandalize your property because I think your political orientation or that of your company is not "on the right side of history" ?
Come on. Not that I support destroying anything, private or public, for rhetorical effect. But assaulting someone or destroying their property has an incomparably larger impact on that individual than destroying a vehicle that won't even show up in Google's balance sheet.
I didn't justify anything. Just pointed out the false equivalence. We could also argue about the effect of systemic shoplifting, but that is also neither here nor there.
Google has proven to not be a company to trust about privacy. It's their business model, along with selling data. A few good will public relations moves is likely nothing compared to the unseen dirt and deals they are doing.
Google is a largely autonomous machine, advancement within Google requires people to do visibly disruptive projects and prove initiative, and the next person that wants to advance may look to the same project to undo it
Leadership has their own separate causes that may form your view of what Google’s business model is, but more importantly its at the expense of ignoring the rest of Google and no interest in steering it because they are in the same system
Only two of these companies actually needs your location data to function, it's Uber and Lyft. There's a reasonable case telcos might also need the data for network purposes, but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS. It's safe to say everyone else is basically collecting data for serving ads even if they say otherwise.
The opposite of dragnet surveillance, which is what flock and geofencing warrants are: data aggregated and shared without the consent of the user, is data collection minimization even when done for security or apps.
> Only two of these companies actually needs your location data to function, it's Uber and Lyft.
I disagree that they need my location data. I am perfectly capable of telling them the location where I want a pick-up, and they are perfectly capable of imposing penalties if I incorrectly report it. Just like happened with cabs in the old days, who were somehow able to pick me up without real-time location tracking.
(Not to say that you shouldn't be able to just turn on location tracking if that's what you want to do, but there's no reason that they can't function without it.)
> but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS
Worth noting that 6G MIMO beamforming requires being able to calculate incredibly accurate location information in order to tune the signal towards your device. I don't know enough to be able to speak more in depth about this, but my guess would be that the adage of cell AP based aGPS is likely to be able to surface far more accurate device location than before.
> but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS
My knowledge in this topic is not deep, but cell precision should be pretty accurate, because modern cell tower areas are much smaller, then to have well tuned beamformer it need to have relative precise angles between antennas and know signal travel time (distance). I think it should achieve something 30 or 15 meter precision (doing assumption that distance is accurate in 50/100ns order)
Completely concur with this, though I do miss being able to browse for places in Google Maps and easily see when I was last there. This functionality disappeared when my location information went local only.
I hate this change. I loved how the original Timeline worked, and now it's unusable. I don't care about courts subpoeaning my data. I'd love to opt in to previous status quo. I don't care about the loss of "privacy" in the context that was never important to me.
Most people are like me: they don't care about being protected from the courts, because the courts don't pose risk to them, and as a matter of statistical fact, they are correct.
This position is insanely illiberal. This isn't about your individual safety, or how willing you as an individual are to abdicate your right to privacy. It's about the knock-on effect of living under panopticon conditions, the chilling effect, the loss of trust, and the nearly unlimited potential for abuse. This individualistic attitude makes it so easy to divide and conquer each and every one of your rights and protections, and will leave you less free as an individual than if you were willing to look at the bigger picture and stand up for rights you don't personally care about.
Maybe, but in MN, they just decided as a matter of the state constitution that this basically isn't allowable.
You see, the cops had a murder in a remote place. They got a warrant, and the warrant showed 12 people in and out of a small area near the murder, of which one phone went there many times.
They got another warrant, for that one phone, and traced it back to someone who is obviously the murderer. The courts decided to suppress this, never mind the cops got warrants at both steps, and their investigation was as minimally invasive as one could imagine for this sort of thing.
So it's not unreasonable to wonder just what we're protecting sometimes, as I understand that while the decision here doesn't technically ban all geofence warrants, it makes them nearly impossible as a practical matter.
Exactly, and to make sure that never happens again why not just arrest all 12 of those people until they prove their innocence? With enough constant surveillance we can be positive that no bad person ever gets away with anything.
Honestly, do you look at the justice system in the United States and think "You know the real issue here is that not enough people are being punished"?
> Honestly, do you look at the justice system in the United States and think "You know the real issue here is that not enough people are being punished"?
I have a family member who was murdered. I have a lot of sympathy for victims of violent crimes like this and a hard time understanding people who want to let the murderers go free, because I know what it's like living under the threat of one who kept a list of who they intended to kill next.
But look at how many people have been unjustly/incorrectly imprisoned for many years in the US, often based on poverty or racism. Would you be willing to jail 5 people for life-without-parole if you're 100% sure ONE of them was the murderer of your family member? What about two people?
I've never seen someone get sent to prison just because their phone was too close to a crime scene, there's always more to corroborate it because it's not much on its own, even if the MN case comes pretty close with only one person in a remote area with the dead body over and over who also coincidentally had motive, etc. Most of the famous cases of what you mention rely on humans identifying a person and DNA later exonerating them.
So I'm loathe to rule out the use of more accurate ways to pinpoint investigations when the status quo is someone who thinks they saw the person at the scene, when we know how unreliable that is.
That feels like throwing out DNA because there are many explanations of why it might be at a crime scene in favor of good old fashioned witness identification, never mind one is a lot better than the other, even if both of them have been misused terribly at times.
That's why I think we should want the cops to use methods that cause fewer people to get wrongly investigated, because it is a burden. It's true, your phone being too close to a crime scene doesn't make you a criminal, but it's probably a better reason for investigating you than traditional things like "I saw a guy who looked like that at the scene" which has much more frequently caused the harm you cite, and yet it's been a staple of courts longer than any of us have been alive.
I think in much the same way that your life has been touched by a murderer and it has influenced your opinion, if you were wrongly accused of a crime it would likewise have influence.
That being said, I'm sympathetic to your point here and I'm not advocating for eye witness testimony becoming the only source of truth. If I could somehow know for sure that this would ONLY be used for the worst of violent crimes it would soften my opinion, but I am very sure that the more normalized this sort of dragnet investigation becomes the standard of what "requires" it's use will get lower and lower.
If policing were entirely focused on violent and property crimes many of my opinions might change, but realistically I think we can agree that whatever investigative technique we are talking about will primarily end up being used to prosecute drug crimes, because that is much safer and more profitable for the police. Do you really want to be on a suspect list everytime someone thinks they saw a drug deal somewhere and you happened to be near?
Sorry, I’m not chilled at all by the prospect that the court can subpoena my data from Goole. It can already issue a warrant to arrest me, and to search my actual home.
The trouble is that you aren't chilled at all today.
Tomorrow's government may decide that attending certain protests, or having "associated" with certain people was always a crime. It doesn't even need to be "retroactive", since enforcement and interpretation of the law is always adjustable in the present.
This sort of thing is happening today in certain countries. Why are you so sure it won't happen to you in yours?
It kind of sounds like you are saying you don't care if other people are hurt, as long as it doesn't impact you. I hope that isn't what you actually mean.
Most people are like me: they don't care about being protected from the courts, because the courts don't pose risk to them, and as a matter of statistical fact, they are correct.
The problem is, unfortunately, those data lakes are in the category "safe until they aren't." Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws in the European sphere, for example, because they know that the courts (and executive) don't pose a risk to most Germans... Until suddenly they do, and the only defense is not having aggregated the data in the first place.
To be clear, no disagreement with your self-risk-assessment, and reasonable people can disagree on where their paranoia threshold is.
Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws. And yet... Germany has a central registry of all Jews, because of the address registration and the religion tax. The last thing you would expect them to have!
Huh? My understanding is that they have religion data only for catholics/protestants, and only on local level, not in a central database. Which yes that should be killed too but no other faith is recorded, since they only collect taxes for those two.
Places that aren't the United States aren't obliged to treat their history of speech the way the US does.
The US's protections are rooted in observations of local authority (and Crown-backed authority) trying to disrupt what the revolutionaries self-observed to be peaceful demonstrations, peaceful entry of thought into the public discourse, and public discourse itself. It's grounded in Enlightenment-era belief that unsuppressed discourse is the best path to real truths, and respect for real truths via the distributed, democratic comprehension of them are the foundation of good governance and good society.
Germany watched a significantly post-Enlightenment, free, democratic people talk its way from democracy straight into fascism, and concluded that some kinds of discourse are so toxic to the actual practice of discovery of the aforementioned truths that they are to be excluded from the public sphere.
Both cultures came by their conclusions honestly and there's some merit to both points of view.
Most people don't have your luxury of not worrying about government overreach.
It sure would have been useful for governments in the South to grab the location data of enslaved people trying to escape—would they, like the average user today, have known to turn off these settings?
It's great for Texas to buy data from brokers about women trying to access reproductive healthcare across state lines from apps carelessly sharing it. The courts don't pose a risk to you until the law changes and suddenly they do.
This is about the government getting data through a loophole that violates the 4th amendment—the difference between a society that collects everything and presumes guilt, and one that targets specific people when they're suspected of a specific crime.
>With cameras going up everywhere, operated by the government and with AI enabled, I wonder if geofencing is the biggest privacy threat we have.
There's a cynical joke in the refrigeration/hvac industry to the tune of "it's good for the environment as long as DuPont has a monopoly on it/the 3rd world isn't making it" in reference to refrigerants' reliable pattern of being identified as bad for the environment and get regulated away right as patents expire, manufacturing proliferates and they and the equipment that uses them become cheap.
Geofencing warrants and cell location data collection give me the same sort of "they're getting rid of it to move onto the next thing" vibes. Not that we shouldn't get rid of it.
I've been listening to this live and it's clear how Kavenaugh will vote regardless of the validity of the arguments. His mind is set and he's well into coming up with barely related hypotheticals introducing exigency into a case where there was none (the geofencing request for spying on a large group of people was done a week after the crime occured).
You're presupposing there's a valid argument for the other side. The text of the fourth amendment clearly connects the scope of privacy to property rights:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Cell location data belongs to AT&T and Verizon, not the accused individual. As to such third-party data, there's a general principle rooted in Roman law that third parties can be compelled to provide documents in their possession to aid a court proceeding: https://commerciallore.com/2015/06/04/a-brief-history-of-sub... ("In an early incarnation of mandatory minimum sentencing there were only two offences that automatically attracted the death penalty, treason and failing to answer a subpoena. Subpoenas as a tool of justice were considered so important that failing to answer it was a most egregious violation of civic duty. A person accused of murder may or may not be guilty, but if a person refused to answer a subpoena then they were seen as denying Jupiter’s justice itself.").
> You're presupposing there's a valid argument for the other side.
How about this part of the amendment?
> "The right of the people to be secure in their persons against unreasonable searches shall not be violated"
Isn't treating people like suspects (investigating them, searching their belongings, tracking them, etc.) merely because a third party claimed (and of course GPS is never inaccurate) that they passed within some vague proximity of a crime scene a violation of their security in their persons? Do you really have reasonable suspicion that every individual among the dozens (or more) you dragged into your search may have committed a crime if it's clear the others are there for unrelated reasons?
Treating people like potential suspects isn't a "search" of their "persons" (bodies), "houses, papers, and effects." How would it even work if police needed a warrant to even consider someone as a suspect and investigate them?
You understand "being secure in your person" is not merely "I don't get physically touched", right? If I stalked you every day without ever touching you, you wouldn't feel so secure in your person, would you? If I was a police officer, you still wouldn't feel so secure, would you? If you knew I was doing this remotely instead of in-person, by monitoring you over video cameras across the city and tracking all your moves with your own GPS devices, you surely wouldn't feel so secure, would you?
People (maybe not you, but most humans) feel threatened when all their moves are being tracked. There's an implicit threat of physical harm even if it hasn't occurred thus far. Not to mention there's also the risk of a bad actor (read: including law enforcement insider) stealing your tracking data that was supposedly only ever being used for good. It's a real threat to your security, and you have a right to be secure. If another person is going to threaten a free person's security, they sure as hell need both the legal authority and reasonable suspicion of a crime. That is the amendment.
Where to draw the line for "reasonable" here can vary somewhat, but I think most people would agree that if you have 3 people all in close proximity to a crime, you could justify having reasonable suspicion of each individual of being involved. If you have a hundred people walking in a half-mile radius, you clearly don't. Idk where the line exactly is, and circumstances can affect things, but somewhere between those seems like a reasonable place to start.
You used the word "feel" four times in your post, but it appears zero times in the fourth amendment:
> "The right of the people [1] to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, [2] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The clause labeled [2] limits the scope of the clause labeled [1]. It's not a free-floating right to "feel secure" against anything--people following you, etc. It's a right "to be secure in [your] person" "against" a specific intrusion: "unreasonable searches and seizures."
If it said: "you have a right not to be mauled by lions," that wouldn't mean you have a right not to be eaten by hippos. Much less that you have a right not to "feel" threatened by the prospect of being eaten by hippos.
> You used the word "feel" four times in your post, but it appears zero times in the fourth amendment. The clause labeled [2] limits the scope of the clause labeled [1]. It's not a free-floating right to "feel secure" against anything--people following you, etc. It's a right "to be secure in [your] person" "against" a specific intrusion: "unreasonable searches and seizures."
It the word "feel" distracted you from the underlying point.
First: "being secure in your person" does mean to include feelings as well as actual harm (“protected from... danger” as well as "free from fear"). See [1] for example. I am approximately 99% sure the authors of that amendment would have felt that government officials following them around would have directly violated that amendment, and I would be shocked to hear you're actually arguing otherwise. (Are you?)
Second: you're either misunderstanding or completely ignoring the actual physical danger here. Again, I refer you to my previous question, which you did not address: if I was stalking you 24/7, would you say you ARE secure in your person/effects/etc.? If other people claimed you ARE secure, would you agree with them? Would it change if I was a police officer? Are you seriously going to argue that my stalking is only impacting your feelings regarding your security, not your actual security?
I'm focusing on the word "feel" because it illustrates that you're reading words and ideas into the sentence that aren't there.
"Be[ing] secure in your person" doesn't encompass feelings. The text of the fourth amendment is objective. It refers to objective actions. It's not talking about people's subjective "feelings" about actions.
Your argument doesn't even make sense on its own terms. Let's say the fourth amendment does cover how people feel about government action. Then how do we decide whether people "feel" threatened by geofencing warrants? Do we take a poll? I suspect if you did take a poll, you'd find that most people trust law enforcement and don't "feel" threatened by the police using geofencing warrants to catch bank robbers.
You're also overlooking the rest of the text. The amendment doesn't end at "be secure." It doesn't guarantee being secure--much less feeling secure--from an entire universe of things. The sentence is limited to security "against" two specific things: "unreasonable searches and seizures." It doesn't say anything about the government investigating you or following you around using data available from somewhere else.
We don't have to guess at what "the authors of [the] amendment would have felt." They wrote down what they meant! When they mean to be broad and general, they used broad and general words. The first amendment says: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." That's very broad! If the first amendment said "abridging the freedom of speech to publish books" that would be narrower.
If you take the 4th Amendment to specifically and solely bar inconveniencing property owners without a warrant, then you are arguing that the 4th Amendment is a water sandwich. When the 4th Amendment was actually written, it was not actually possible for the investigative powers of the state to not inconvenience a property holder. But we've been able to violate people's right to privacy without them even knowing for almost a century now.
Furthermore, the last major SCOTUS case regarding this issue[0] had some very interesting dissenting opinions specifically on the question of "Does the 4th Amendment only guarantee property rights". Justice Thomas made the exact same argument you made. Justice Gorsuch took your argument and twisted it inside out. He specifically argued that because the 4th Amendment is a protection on property, the third-party doctrine should be thrown out entirely, and that you should still own your personal information even if you have to lend it to a phone company in order for them to connect you.
So yes, there are valid arguments for the other side, even in the "4A only protects property" regime.
Ah, you're a bit confused about the case the court is hearing. This is explcitly not about telco basestation records. It is about the records for location data recorded on the smart phones of individuals. GPS recorded on their personal property, not multi-lateration from telco owned third party property. It's all very accessible if you give it a listen. It's streaming live on youtube.
I haven't heard the argument so maybe it's getting into that. But my understanding--based on a few articles--is that the case is (at least partly?) about geofencing information stored on Google's servers. E.g. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/27/nx-s1-5777656/supreme-court-g...
"But after two months of working the case, all leads had gone dry. So police applied for a geofence warrant directed at Google and all its collected and stored cellphone location information.
A state magistrate judge found probable cause to issue the warrant and authorized the disclosure of Google's location information for an area the size of about three football fields around the Midlothian bank at the time of the robbery."
This is not about local storage. It's about location data gathered from apps and phone OS operators, which is much more akin to telco records than confiscating everyone's phone to look for evidence.
And why should we defer to ancient principles in a case regarding cell phone metadata that can be used in innumerable ways to violate privacy? To me it seems obvious that if the 4th Amendment were written today by anyone other than cops, this exact case would have been covered.
I doubt it. According to the 1960s courts, they did because this “ancient concept” was essentially common sense. If you tell someone something, you shouldn’t expect a constitutional right to it remaining a secret. If I told someone I robbed a bank and my confidant calls the police, why shouldn’t they use this information? Should the courts respect mafia NDAs?
The banking aspects didn’t show up until the mid 70s. Personally, I think technology changed society in ways the constitution isn’t prepared for. In 1790 a banker was a dude you worked with in a local institution. In 1975 half of California was a Bank of America customer.
The constitution didn’t anticipate this and you’d need an amendment to create some sort of agent or attorney like privilege. It’s a fairly nuanced issue — from the humans point of view, an email is like a letter, and Google Drive is like a file cabinet. But the courts are forced to think about the where the logical artifact (ie the folder) is located. A USB drive in a drawer is protected, but the file in Google is not.
> As long as a judge issued the warrant for geofence data, I see less wrong with it. It passed judicial scrutiny, AND can itself be challenged.
The cops say "someone committed a crime in this area, we need to find the perp". They can pretty much say this for any part of the town at any given time. A judge signs off on the warrant, because why wouldn't they? You don't get to challenge anything: no one is going to tell you "hey, your phone was in that area, come to the courthouse and make your case if you think the police shouldn't be given that info".
Im comparing due process with a judges' signature, compared to shit like FLOCK and other non-search warranted processes. And if the warrant was deemed wrongfully granted, the case itself can be dismissed or mistrial.
How much corporate data was just purchased rather than search warranted? Data brokers and parallel construction is a lot larger issue.
And about the cops giving that "someone committed a crime in this area, we need to find the perp" - pig's will always give bullshit reasons. Thats why I went to the judge's determination, rather than oinkers demanding everything and manufacturing whatever they want.
imo there should be a requirement for the gov to tell you within a reasonable time period (a year?) whenever a search warrant is granted for your data. currently there is no ability to check the government because you never learn that you were searched.
I listened to the arguments, here's my notes live:
--
One justice asked petitioner that because 'If you don't want the government to have your location history, you just flip that off. You dont have to have that feature on your phone. so whats the issue?'
They continue to talk about the Terms of Service stating that Google will comply with legitimate government requests. And both the petitioner and justices seem to agree that ANY data would be then up for grabs by the government (without a warrant) if it is stored in the cloud (including email, docs, photos, calendar, business records, etc). Sotomayor points out that the government would need NO warrant to access these records.
The google feature doesn't exist anymore. But in the amicus brief some 30 providers still have features in similar pattern of record storage. 'Google can track you down to 3 feet'. Google had to search "500 million" accounts for the search in question.
Justice Jackson asks why they aren't looking at the case as a 'reasonable expectation of privacy'? The petitioner agrees, and points out that the data is protected by a password. So the data is NOT public.
"Data on the network is property." - how we get laws against stealing data/trespassing data
Probable Cause was an interesting argument. about 90 minutes in. It went by too quickly. The justice seems to say that google's servers are one 'place'. The justice also sees the output of 3 people despite google 'searching' 19 people as the only people who matter.
Responder is leaning heavy into the 'consent' for google to store location history. Is it possible to turn location history off on modern android phones? Responder also argues that because you're in public AT SOME POINT, then your location data is no different than a cctv data pointing at the street. Then a justice interrupts to make the responder say that YES the government CAN perform these searches on anyone it wants any time it wants without a warrant. For example people who seek abortion, or were at a political event. And the responder agrees!
Responder says the email, photos, and docs still need a warrant because they're like your thoughts or mail, where location is different because people are 'constantly advertising' their location to google.
To me, the responder is arguing two things:
1. That whatever you do in public is always available without a warrant
2. Your location history stored in google (or others) are generated in public and are therefore don't require a warrant.
Responder says location records are records google creates on your phone. Justice asks why no one of the 500M people who were searched have complained? (idk, maybe because we have no way of knowing we were searched?)
> 'If you don't want the government to have your location history, you just flip that off. You dont have to have that feature on your phone. so whats the issue?'
Can someone catch me up on how the settlement against Google where turning off location on your phone didn't stop them from collecting location data, plays in this Supreme Court case?
Isn't this like cell tower data, where the user doesn't have a choice if their location data is collected?
Simplest way I have boiled it down in my head (what's actually being decided that is- there is a lot of ancillary question and discussion above that isn't ultimately relevant to the case at hand):
Bank records are correspondence between a person and the bank, not “persons, houses, papers, and effects” as protected by the Fourth Amendment. As such, they’re subject to subpoena.
Now, Congress could extend similar protections to bank records any time they like. Vote accordingly.
That’s not how it was understood at the time of ratification. Letters and the post office were a thing then, mentioned elsewhere in the Constitution. If the framers of the 4th amendment wanted it to cover them they would have written the amendment differently.
> The justice seems to say that google's servers are one 'place'.
So a large apartment tower housing, I dunno, thousands, of families can entirely be searched because it's just "one place"? Chances are this even multiple buildings, so really more like a whole apartment complex. Sorry, someone in building 56 was maybe selling drugs, we're here to dig through your wardrobe even though you're in building 12 half a block away..."
They might as well apply for warrants as "Sol 3, Earth".
> And both the petitioner and justices seem to agree that ANY data would be then up for grabs by the government (without a warrant) if it is stored in the cloud (including email, docs, photos, calendar, business records, etc).
You must have misheard this as this is not true country wide (see US v Warshak) and in practice the government treats these as needing a warrant because of that and the time requirement in the Stored Communications Act (and any major provider will explicitly refuse handing over content data without a warrant).
Gorsuch in particular thinks the Third Party Doctrine is bullshit and is happy to write that down (like in Carpenter) and today seemed to be trotting that out again (though I only read the beginning of arguments).
I'll wait for the transcript but happy to listen if you have a timestamp.
> Later the same question was put to the government, and they admitted the same: under the government's theory a warrant would not be needed.
You said the opposite:
> Responder says the email, photos, and docs still need a warrant because they're like your thoughts or mail
From Orin Kerr's live tweets (Feigin for DOJ, Unikowsky for Chatrie) of what I believe you were summarizing there:
> Barrett: I'm concerned with your position being maximalist, too. Calendars, photos, email. And monitoring of homes. Are you conceding this would be a search?
> Feigin: Warrant is needed for calendars, photos, email. [OK comments: Virtual lockers]. Not conceding homes.
...
> Finally, Unikowksy rebuttal: We welcome the government's concession as to calendars, photos. But I don't understand how they distinguish that from this.
> That whatever you do in public is always available without a warrant
That's not relevant to this case.
Suppose I'm traveling in the back of a van with blacked windows. Nobody can see me. No camera in the world will record me. They are arguing that I still have no expectation of privacy, which is ridiculous. Maybe if you are walking around with your face visible, sure, but that's a important condition.
Another problem with this argument is facial recognition is far from perfect.
With parallel construction on the menu, this is largely academic. There is zero percent chance police and those who profit from their patronage will give up cell location sweeps.
You cannot do a parallel construction if the telecom operator refuses to share data with you in the first place. And if SCOTUS makes the right decision here they will have legal grounds to refuse.
Again, I hope your position here is something more than 'largely academic.' Optimistically it may be, history tells us AT&T Mobile, T-mobile, Verizon, etc (pretty much all the major carriers except perhaps Dish) have been caught selling data for a buck and have still only pledged not to sell to agreggators (not law enforcement). There is incontrovertible evidence major carriers are ready and willing, and indeed have sold this to patrons they can profit from.
In theory your comment may be a rebuttal to the 'largely academic' assertion I made, in practice it's largely a distinction without much difference. Your rebuttal is a pretty remarkable, eccentric claim in the context of the vast majority of telcos that will share the data for a profit (as I put it, 'profit from the patronage [of the police]'). Whether the request comes in the form of a warrant -- again -- largely academic in such case. Your assertion requires some strong data to overcome the evidence to the contrary, if it is intended as a rebuttal.
It's also worth noting illegally executed warrants don't stop you from getting the data. I've had cops force a hospital to search me before, then get the warrant actually signed after they did it. It didn't stop the hospital from executing the warrant, it just means they evidence couldn't be directly used against me. That's another lever they have, illegally execute a warrant, get the evidence they can't use in court, then parallel construction. Sure your lawyer can argue "the fruits of this warrant have to be tossed out" but it doesn't mean dick -- they already secretly used it to get other evidence that won't be tossed out.
There's a nice map on Bluesky of what area of data Google is being asked to hand over. To be honest it's not actually huge. Personally though, that feels like not a great safeguard, not enough to make me ok with this. https://bsky.app/profile/audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app/post/3...
Worth noting that Google has changed its practice since 2019, supposedly, to keep location data on device, not accessible to them. However I have little doubt the cellphone carriers are also available to provide this data. https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/5/24172204/google-maps-delet...
Governments rapidly turning data into a liability. Data is the new oil is out, data is the new toxic waste is in. The consumer sentiment continues to get worse and worse as it becomes clearer and clearer that we are being intruded upon at will. It would be excellent to see some progress, in expanding & respecting our human rights to privacy.
> It would be excellent to see some progress, in expanding & respecting our human rights to privacy.
There are many laws in place in EU which forbids many kind of practices which infringe on privacy, but the issue is that governments don't really enforce them proactively. And in some cases where they are the ones breaking them (e.g. by enacting law that is not compatible with EU Charter or ECHR) it will take long time to get judgement which forbids the practice.
Often the path is that you complain to DPA, you appeal to court, you appeal to higher court, (repeat last step X times), during court appeals you may need to wait for CJEU ruling and finally you might be able to file appeal to ECtHR.
In one "recent" case from Finland the original DPA decision was issued in 8/2020. I'm not sure how long this exact case took, but there are some recent decisions which took 5 years to issue. It was appealed to administrative court and court made request to CJEU on 11/2021. CJEU gave ruling on 6/2023. Administrative court gave ruling on 12/2023. It was appealed and higher administrative court gave ruling on 6/2025.
So it could take 10 years to annul an illegal law or practice.
What's the difference between police looking up geofence data for the bank before and after a robbery to see who was there, and checking the bank's outdoor cameras to see what license plates were there?
One would be scope. There's a big difference between a security camera next to a secure facility (bank, police evidence facility, school) and a 1 mi radius circle around that facility. Security cameras around a bank only track stuff within a field of view from the bank. A cell geofence could be millions of people if it's drawn in midtown.
Another would be incentives. There's no reason to collect cell location data for everyone if you aren't able to use it for anything. I think just the fact that we are all monitored constantly is its own violation of our rights. We should have laws banning these practices.
Here's the text of the fourth amendment. Could you explain how "scope" and "incentives" are relevant distinguishing factors under that?
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
As relevant here, there's two pieces. The threshold requirement is some sort of ownership. The right exists with respect to "their persons, houses, papers, and effects." Assuming digital data constitutes "papers," the accused has to show that it's "their" papers. The hypothetical you're responding to compares the bank's camera footage with the cell phone company's location information. Those seem indistinguishable for that prong.
You have a reasonable argument that "scope" and "incentives" are relevant to the second prong of what's "unreasonable." But you don't get there if you don't get past the first prong, right?
That's something that gets me every time I hear phrases like 'exact reading' of the Constitution. Do we honestly believe the writers of the document would have written exactly the same if they had today's technology? There's no way they could fathom always on two-way realtime radio communication devices, but they could easily have written the Constitution accordingly if they had them. The spirit and intent was clear. We're just willfully ignoring that intent because it would be inconvenient for big brother to do the snooping.
No, of course we don't believe they would have written it that way today. But neither you nor me nor anyone else gets to make up what we think they'd have said. They didn't say it. They're dead. They can't change what the law says. But, guess what? We can.
The law as written provides the rules of the game. Nobody should get to cheat, not the government, not a citizen, not a business, just because someone can plausibly argue that if the law were rewritten today it'd be written differently.
If the claim is true that the law would be and should be written differently today, then: Rewrite. The. Law.
If you don't have enough public support for that, then you have no business imposing your view on your fellow citizens. If you do have enough public support, but Congress is being dysfunctional (this is usually the case today), then communicate with your congresspeople and/or try vote them out, and persuade your fellow citizens to do the same. Don't cheat at the game. Play it.
Now, to be fair, those polls aren't asking people about location data specifically. I'm open to seeing specific polling on this issue. But based on the lack of any political will to do anything about TSA, my suspicion is that "regular citizens" are okay with the police using location data to catch bank robbers.
So maybe your "the game is rigged" point cuts the other way. It's rigging the game when fancy lawyers make complicated arguments about what James Madison would have thought about geofencing, in an effort to impose shackles on the police "regular citizens" never voted for.
IMO it is tangibly different. Having yourself, your things, or your house searched in the 1700s is a much bigger inconvenience and invasion of privacy than a cellular provider noting your phone was in the general vicinity of an area. I don't think the spirit or intent of the amendment would apply in cases where there is no tangible impact to the individual being searched.
If we don't want the government to be able to do that, we should pass laws to that effect.
A third party giving an indication as to where my phone might be is not comparable to having my house searched by soldiers.
Though again, making no judgment as to whether or not it should be allowed. I just think it should be a law, and not casting modern values on the 1700s era founders' words.
Oh, absolutely. But the general idea here is that just because it can be done without inconveniencing you should not really make a difference: there were no such things as databases and remote monitoring in those days unless you want to equate some written record in the physical possession of the authorities as a 'search of your person', which it clearly would not be. So this tech angle opens up all kinds of cans of worms (scale, speed, scope to name a few) and the founders whose words are holy had absolutely no way to anticipate this. If they had I'm fairly sure they would have had something reasonable to be said about it, those were pretty smart guys and they seem to have had the right intent on safeguarding the country for as far as they could look ahead.
I'm also pretty sure they would be 100% horrified by what it has become.
So yes, it should be law. The US supreme court however does not make laws (or at least, they shouldn't be), they interpret the constitution. And the US constitution is well overdue for a more tech aware version, it's just that with the lawmakers apparently in the pockets of the tech billionaires I think that the chances of such an overhaul approach zero.
> Do we honestly believe the writers of the document would have written exactly the same if they had today's technology? There's no way they could fathom always on two-way realtime radio communication devices, but they could easily have written the Constitution accordingly if they had them.
I suspect you're right--a bunch of high-IQ libertarian men who had just overthrown their government would write the 4th amendment differently if confronted with universal digital surveillance. But is that how we decide the legal effect of the constitution? We're stuck not only with what the founders actually wrote, but what they would have written if confronted with modern facts?
What are the parameters of this analysis? Do we assume the same James Madison--we have transported him into present day with his knowledge and thought processes intact and are simply presenting him with additional facts? Or do we assume a modern James Madison--the same kind of person today that James Madison was back then. And who decides what reincarnated James Madison would or would not have done--and why do we trust that this medium is correct?
I think it's simpler to say that the meaning of the constitution ends at what is written. What the founders intended is relevant to the extent we're trying to figure out what what they meant, at the time, by the words they used. But we won't go so far as to speculate about what the founders would have written if confronted with modern facts. We have people who can decide what to do about modern facts: they're called voters.
The fact they allowed for ammendments tells me they acknowledge that things would change in the future. Nobody can predict the future, but allowing for a "living" document to be updated with the times suggests that's their allowing some flex. Here's where we are starting, but if we get 2/3 of both chambers to agree, then update the original.
> I think it's simpler to say that the meaning of the constitution ends at what is written. What the founders intended is relevant to the extent we're trying to figure out what what they meant, at the time, by the words they used.
This is a bit of a specious argument, though, since of course what they wrote often didn't clearly articulate what they necessarily meant. You even point this out above: what is ownership, and what is unreasonable? Does entrusting your effects to a third party for safe keeping make them less your effects, etc.
> since of course what they wrote often didn't clearly articulate what they necessarily meant.
Sure. But what "they necessarily meant by the words they said" is different from "what they would have said if confronted with different facts."
The ownership issue is a good example. Does the word "their ... papers and effects" include third-party data about someone? Third-party data existed in 1789. British people love record-keeping, and the founders were sophisticated people with lawyers, accountants, merchant accounts, etc. If the fourth amendment meant to include third-party information about someone, the founders wouldn't have used the ownership language that they used.
So the real argument is that, if the founders saw how important and sensitive third-party information is today, they would have included it. They wouldn't have used the ownership language they used. That's quite a different argument! It's not just trying to understand what people meant by the words they used. It's trying to reanimate them and ask them questions to scenarios they never contemplated.
Your point cuts in the other direction. The police and the judge who issued the warrant followed current Virginia law. Voters in Virginia could "adjust the laws" to ban the use of geolocation data. They haven't done so.
So the plaintiffs in this case are trying to get the dead hand of the founders to smack the police and the judge. They're the ones invoking "sacred texts" written 237 years ago by a bunch of old white guys to ask the Supreme Court to overrule what police in Virginia did pursuant to Virginia law.
Your post raises the question: who is the "we" you're referring to--the "we" who is empowered to "adjust the laws?" Who is empowered to decide whether circumstances have, in fact, changed? And if there has been a change--which way do those changes cut? Surely it's the current voters of Virginia who get to make that decision, right?
> If we decide the Fourth Amendment applies here, Virginia law loses.
Yes, but the only way to do that is to say that the dead hand of the founders overrules current Virginia law. The plaintiffs want James Madison from his grave to impose restrictions on the police that voters in Virginia in 2026 have declined to impose.
Not according to the comment I was responding to: "Has anything changed since the sacred texts were written or we just going to keep acting as though we can never adjust the laws."
Things can change in a way that's covered by the Constitution. Say, technology that makes Fourth Amendment violations easier to do; still potentially covered!
Things can change in a way that's not covered by the Constitution. Now you need an amendment.
The Fourth Amendment is quite broad and can thus handle all sorts of change.
You are both correct, but rayiner's comment goes to the up-thread rhetorical question:
> Has anything changed since the sacred texts were written or we just going to keep acting as though we can never adjust the laws
... the answer is "Oh boy, Chatrie sure does hope nothing has changed, and the Founders would have hated geofencing had they had any way to know what it was! Otherwise, the laws passed in the past 50 years say it's legal and fine."
No, it doesn't. The person I'm responding to is using semantics to claim the 4th amendment didn't mention scope and therefore privacy against search is irrelevant. My point is that acting as though the constitution of the us is some infallible holy text leads society down a path with learned priests interpreting arcane texts (you are here). Instead of acting as a rational society and addressing a need for citizens to have privacy in a changing technological world.
Debating who the "we" is is losing the forest for the trees--we're wading into a conversation debating the power of a state or local municipality instead of looking at the actual issue where the federal government isn't protecting is citizens because "technically the slaveowners didn't say cell phone in their document".
It is a (possibly flawed) feature of the US Constitutional form of government that there is a proper channel for adjusting the enumerated rights in it, and that process is via amendment.
I'd like it to be otherwise, but this Court has demonstrated in its overturning of Roe v. Wade that the risk of leaving it up to SCOTUS to synthesize "prenumbrae" and rights to privacy (which would have not been a thing anyone would have written in the 1700s) is that reasonable people can disagree on what those things are, unless you write them down explicitly in the document that requires a lot of effort to change.
>Security cameras around a bank only track stuff within a field of view from the bank. A cell geofence could be millions of people if it's drawn in midtown.
Given the ubiquity of security cameras they can just canvas local businesses and ask them to give it up. Given that warrants are involved, they can't even refuse.
A business can refuse a warrant, but it takes a legal response in court. Their attorneys need to convince a judge the warrant isn’t necessary - that it causes a bigger burden on them than the benefit to the public. Most businesses will just comply because it’s not in their interests to spend time and money on it.
Sometimes a business will challenge a court order if it’s about their own customers, employees, owners, or business dealings. The information requested should be relevant to the investigation, minimal to be helpful, and create as little burden on the business as is practical.
Also, if you’re not the subject of the investigation it’s often a subpoena rather than a warrant. There are major differences between these types of order in the US. A subpoena is an order to produce the evidence. A warrant is an order that allows law enforcement to seize it, using force if needed. As someone who has dealt with law enforcement requests for business data about customers quite a bit in the past, it’s often a simple request first and a subpoena otherwise.
Yes! That would be fantastic! They would need to approach many people, each having the ability to question the motivation! Or, they would need to convince a judge and obtain a warrant.
This is the disaggregation of power of surveillance.
In addition to the scope and specificity arguments, there is also the reasonable expectation of privacy. Geofence warrants catch up a ton of innocent citizens and violate their 4th amendment right to be secure in their persons and papers.
Outdoor cameras around a bank, and license plates both have their own justifications. Outdoor cameras surveillance is in an area with no reasonable expectation of privacy. License plates are mandated for liability and anti-theft purposes. Your personal phone is both private and has no other pre-textual reason for law enforcement to access it.
A bank's cameras cannot see into private spaces in unrelated buildings as is the explicit situation in this case where most of the people caught in the general dragnet were inside a church some distance away. And to be clearer, the data search is being done on the GPS recordings of personal property (not basestation multi-lateration records). This is the private space being searched. It's like if you carried around a journal and wrote down everywhere you went. Now the government is arguing they can draw arbitrary large general regions and read everyone's personal diary even in situations without any exigency.
Given how many things sorta require a phone, even basic government services, yeah I would say so. It's not just Google phones, all cell carriers are collecting location data.
The difference is ubiquitous surveillance, which is well known to lead to false positives and inhibits freedom and protest. A world where we are all under surveillance and people actually want to increase it is not a free world.
Congress also has the ability to override most laws, as long as they don't violate the constitution. If they make a law that says "the police cannot use cell location data" that will be the law.
Most people don't understand how powerless police are to find criminals. That they catch them at all is often amazing. I have firsthand knowledge of this from a tragic loss in my family. The investigation was severely hindered because investigators could not utilize cell location data, despite knowing someone was present at the scene. Police spent an extensive amount of time trying to identify them without success. When the identity was eventually discovered through entirely different avenues, it confirmed the individual had a cell phone on them. The location data would have resolved the identification trivially. We should enable this capability and put strict "guardrails" on its use.
I have no doubt this geo fencing data solves crimes and I don't even think it's as bad as e.g. the long surveillance in Carpenter.
The problem is that the police are going to start using like they do with much more precise DNA data, and more innocent people are going to caught in the net.
The bar to convict someone (or, more likely, to convince an innocent person to take a plea deal) is not as high ("beyond a reasonable doubt") as some people think. Get caught apparently contradicting hard data or even a witness and there goes your reasonable doubt.
Here is the LLM's summary of the current legal issue at hand:
Attempting to determine the identity of an unknown individual co-located with a victim at a specific time requires a reverse-location query. Because the Supreme Court has not yet established a unified national doctrine for these searches post-Carpenter, lower courts are highly fragmented. Many magistrates systematically refuse to authorize geofence warrants or tower dumps, citing the lack of individualized probable cause for the peripheral, innocent devices swept up in the geographic net.
And indeed, in my case, the police were not able to conduct this geofenced investigation (which would have instantly idenitied the person).
From the article: "Google says it stopped responding to geofence warrants last year, because the company no longer stores such data and instead keeps location data on each user’s device. But law enforcement has made geofence requests of other tech companies, including Apple, Lyft, Snapchat, Uber, Microsoft and Yahoo"
That explains the changes Google did to the Timeline and why you can't see it in the browser anymore. That is great from them actually.
Google got caught in the aftermath of the Carpenter vs. US ruling. https://www.techdirt.com/2023/12/18/google-disrupts-geofence...
By stopping that one specific way they supported warrantless surveillance, Google probably managed to make the current round of litigation moot so that Google won't suffer a negative ruling on the merits. They can start all over again in a slightly different way once the attention goes down a bit.
[dead]
I think the trigger was this: https://www.axios.com/2022/07/01/google-delete-location-hist...
Correct.
Google moved to finally address this after the press started focusing on how hording location data could put women who visited reproductive healthcare clinics in legal jeopardy.
> Privacy advocates fear Google will be used to prosecute abortion seekers
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/11/1110391316/google-data-aborti...
Google never gets credit for shit like this, or their results in zero-knowledge maths and implementations, which are genuine public service beyond immediate productization.
If Google had decided to move on this back when people first started being falsely accused of crimes based on geofence data, they might be more deserving of credit.
For instance, in 2018:
> Avondale Man Sues After Google Data Leads to Wrongful Arrest for Murder
https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/google-geofence-locatio...
To be fair... I miss being able to access my location history data via the browser. So it's not a case of "google being evil", it's a case of "sane defaults", "shifting regulations", and "unintended consequences". Google should get the accolades they deserve in this case.
Google doesn't care that their business model is hording data in a manner that puts users at risk from any malicious government official.
They merely bowed to public pressure when the press turned against Google because continuing to horde location data put women seeking abortions in legal jeopardy.
To deserve accolades, they would need to stop hording all the other types of data and adopt a business model not based on spying on everyone as much as possible.
They killed a lot of functionality. For instance, if you opened the details of a place, it used to tell you when all your visits were. I feel the timeline is mostly abandonware these days.
From a factual standpoint it's good to acknowledge that pro-privacy work. From a standpoint of overall evaluating the actions, goals, incentives, and impacts of the company, they mean basically nothing. They are a surveillance advertising company, they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them.
No - they are an advertising company. It is to their advantage to be ahead of the game with something like federated ML if that is where society is headed. To say Google has no positive impact is absurd - engineers there generally care about protecting user data. There is probably better access controls at Google than anywhere else. Sure there are pressures like you said but a gross misplace of user trust is what would destroy them.
Don't hate the player, hate the game.
they kind of made the game, they are hardly victims here. I shouldn't have to be in a position to decide whether I trust them with a profile of all of my history and activities, especially when I never had an option to opt out, much less opt in.
I am probably far more sympathetic than you can ever imagine but the antecedents are not really unique to google. The technical destination of targeting advertising just looks like this given privacy laws (well the lack thereof).
See https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/04/eff-congress-heres-wha... or probably any recent publication about privacy rights by the eff.
Like I get it but be mad that congress is a bunch of goofy old people who give zero shits. If you can point at some lobbying by google then by all means so be it - certainly they appeared to have kissed the ring as of late. But keep in mind googlers personally direct money into the eff every year too.
>they will never, and can never, have a positive impact on privacy or human rights. To do so would destroy them.
I dislike Google as much as the next guy, but, regardless of its intentions in making Chrome and Android open source and secure, it has a huge positive impact on privacy and human rights.
This is a bizarre take that doesn't account for the impact google has had. Over the last 15 years, Google has steadily and deliberately maximized the commoditization of user data, single handedly driven the adtech industry into an unstoppable enshittification engine, built a moat out of making the internet a much worse place, swung around their money and legal resources to squash small companies, destroyed users lives when they made the mistake of depending on Google for anything important, are enthusiastic participants in global scale political manipulation, censorship, and outright market manipulation.
The purpose of a thing is what it does - android and chrome and everything else Google does serves to maintain or extend their control over the value and flow of user data.
Android and Chrome are net negatives. Google subsumed Firefox, made Mozilla beholden to them, derailed their viability as a competitor to chrome, poached talent, manipulated user exposure, degraded performance targeting competitors, and otherwise engaged in ruthless corporate fuckery to get where they are, with near absolute dominance of the browser market. Android is touted as an alternative to Apple, but they just as enthusiastically build up walled gardens, abuse consumer trust, play into monopolistic market dynamics, empower ISPs and others to force a "you actually rent your device" type model on consumers, and otherwise maximize the amount of money extracted per user without any concurrent return in value.
The internet, smartphones, and browsers are a dystopian, cynical abomination, and if there's any justice in the universe, AI will result in the total dissolution of giant tech companies like Google, and there will be a future free of institutions like it.
Nobody is going to be worried about how you never litter if you're constantly kicking puppies and biting babies on the nose.
People are to busy labeling them and the rest of tech as Far Right to care.
They don't get credit for this particular thing because many, many users lost years of their location data in the transition, and most of the rest had theirs corrupted. It was a poorly-executed transition that screwed a lot of people, so even they themselves don't tout it much.
FWIW, I think Google is overly-hated, but it's hard to frame them as a bleeding-heart altruist. Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.
I worked at google some years back, in the VR team for a while. I can't speak to all of google, but at least in that org, the amount of nonsense we had to go through to make sure there wasn't some way some genius could figure something out related to personal information by correlating various pieces of data that we were storing in good faith to improve the product was absurd.
They were trying really really hard to do the right thing. Lots of people really cared about it, many to the point of it being detrimental to just making the product better.
From my time there, a favorite quip of mine, towards some new startup we bought was: welcome to Google, here is a list of every settlement and consent decree you are now subject to.
>Much like Apple and Microsoft, they have every incentive to work with the government and basically no obligation to individual consumers. It feels likely that these decisions are made to cover their own ass, and not out of overwhelming respect for Android users.
I don't get it. In the first sentence you're claiming that there's "basically no obligation to individual consumers", but when they do a pro-consumer thing, you dismiss it as being "made to cover their own ass". Which one is it? Is this just a lot of words to say that Google isn't as pro-consumer as you'd like it to be?
I don't think Google genuinely does a lot of these things to truly be pro-consumer. One could see these kind of actions as them not wanting to have to deal with the bad publicity of handling all this data that they overall haven't been able to really monetize well anyways.
The truth is probably somewhere in between if you were to actually sit down and talk with all the people involved with such a decision.
Regardless of the reasons though I do think we should give praise to companies and organizations doing things that ultimately benefit us though. We should give feedback as to the changes we like to let decision-makers know people actually do care.
Companies like Google are too large to have single, clear motives.
I think it is appropriate to judge their actions, but I am not sure any simplistic “good motives/bad motives“ discussion can be fruitful.
“Covering their ass” from government pressure. If they can’t provide it they can’t be dinged for not doing so.
Exactly. A lot of people acted like the attacks on Waymos during the ICE protests were random but they were anything but. All the local organizers are well aware of Google's contracts with ICE as well as the tributes Google paid to Trump.
How is this relevant? Just because you disagree with some vague connection between two entities doesn't give you the right to destroy property. That's the definition of a childish tantrum. Inflicting blind pain on random, unrelated people because you don't get your way.
There's a rhetorical dodge in this argument where it transitioned from talking about property destruction to talking about harming people.
One can cause the other, but the burden of proof is on the claimant that wrecking a mass-produced special purpose autonomous vehicle did more tangible harm to a human being than make some engineer sad before they rolled up their sleeves and built a replacement.
The Waymo emphatically did not care it was destroyed.
It's relevant because Waymo is Google
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How can you justify anarchist vigilante violence?
Should I be legally allowed to assault you or vandalize your property because I think your political orientation or that of your company is not "on the right side of history" ?
Come on. Not that I support destroying anything, private or public, for rhetorical effect. But assaulting someone or destroying their property has an incomparably larger impact on that individual than destroying a vehicle that won't even show up in Google's balance sheet.
>an incomparably larger impact on that individual than destroying a vehicle that won't even show up in Google's balance sheet.
Same re*arded argument people use to justify shoplifting. Now tell me genius, what happens to the shops in areas with high crime?
I didn't justify anything. Just pointed out the false equivalence. We could also argue about the effect of systemic shoplifting, but that is also neither here nor there.
Google has proven to not be a company to trust about privacy. It's their business model, along with selling data. A few good will public relations moves is likely nothing compared to the unseen dirt and deals they are doing.
Google is a largely autonomous machine, advancement within Google requires people to do visibly disruptive projects and prove initiative, and the next person that wants to advance may look to the same project to undo it
Leadership has their own separate causes that may form your view of what Google’s business model is, but more importantly its at the expense of ignoring the rest of Google and no interest in steering it because they are in the same system
A machine
Only two of these companies actually needs your location data to function, it's Uber and Lyft. There's a reasonable case telcos might also need the data for network purposes, but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS. It's safe to say everyone else is basically collecting data for serving ads even if they say otherwise.
The opposite of dragnet surveillance, which is what flock and geofencing warrants are: data aggregated and shared without the consent of the user, is data collection minimization even when done for security or apps.
> Only two of these companies actually needs your location data to function, it's Uber and Lyft.
I disagree that they need my location data. I am perfectly capable of telling them the location where I want a pick-up, and they are perfectly capable of imposing penalties if I incorrectly report it. Just like happened with cabs in the old days, who were somehow able to pick me up without real-time location tracking.
(Not to say that you shouldn't be able to just turn on location tracking if that's what you want to do, but there's no reason that they can't function without it.)
> but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS
Worth noting that 6G MIMO beamforming requires being able to calculate incredibly accurate location information in order to tune the signal towards your device. I don't know enough to be able to speak more in depth about this, but my guess would be that the adage of cell AP based aGPS is likely to be able to surface far more accurate device location than before.
with 6G we as humans in everywhere will be able to achieve surveillance that was impossible to think decades ago!
Incredible
> but cell tower data isn't going to be as accurate as GPS
My knowledge in this topic is not deep, but cell precision should be pretty accurate, because modern cell tower areas are much smaller, then to have well tuned beamformer it need to have relative precise angles between antennas and know signal travel time (distance). I think it should achieve something 30 or 15 meter precision (doing assumption that distance is accurate in 50/100ns order)
Completely concur with this, though I do miss being able to browse for places in Google Maps and easily see when I was last there. This functionality disappeared when my location information went local only.
I hate this change. I loved how the original Timeline worked, and now it's unusable. I don't care about courts subpoeaning my data. I'd love to opt in to previous status quo. I don't care about the loss of "privacy" in the context that was never important to me.
Most people are like me: they don't care about being protected from the courts, because the courts don't pose risk to them, and as a matter of statistical fact, they are correct.
This position is insanely illiberal. This isn't about your individual safety, or how willing you as an individual are to abdicate your right to privacy. It's about the knock-on effect of living under panopticon conditions, the chilling effect, the loss of trust, and the nearly unlimited potential for abuse. This individualistic attitude makes it so easy to divide and conquer each and every one of your rights and protections, and will leave you less free as an individual than if you were willing to look at the bigger picture and stand up for rights you don't personally care about.
Maybe, but in MN, they just decided as a matter of the state constitution that this basically isn't allowable.
You see, the cops had a murder in a remote place. They got a warrant, and the warrant showed 12 people in and out of a small area near the murder, of which one phone went there many times.
They got another warrant, for that one phone, and traced it back to someone who is obviously the murderer. The courts decided to suppress this, never mind the cops got warrants at both steps, and their investigation was as minimally invasive as one could imagine for this sort of thing.
So it's not unreasonable to wonder just what we're protecting sometimes, as I understand that while the decision here doesn't technically ban all geofence warrants, it makes them nearly impossible as a practical matter.
One can read the decision here:
https://mncourts.gov/_media/migration/appellate/supreme-cour...
Exactly, and to make sure that never happens again why not just arrest all 12 of those people until they prove their innocence? With enough constant surveillance we can be positive that no bad person ever gets away with anything.
Honestly, do you look at the justice system in the United States and think "You know the real issue here is that not enough people are being punished"?
> Honestly, do you look at the justice system in the United States and think "You know the real issue here is that not enough people are being punished"?
I have a family member who was murdered. I have a lot of sympathy for victims of violent crimes like this and a hard time understanding people who want to let the murderers go free, because I know what it's like living under the threat of one who kept a list of who they intended to kill next.
My sympathies for your loss. That sucks badly.
But look at how many people have been unjustly/incorrectly imprisoned for many years in the US, often based on poverty or racism. Would you be willing to jail 5 people for life-without-parole if you're 100% sure ONE of them was the murderer of your family member? What about two people?
I've never seen someone get sent to prison just because their phone was too close to a crime scene, there's always more to corroborate it because it's not much on its own, even if the MN case comes pretty close with only one person in a remote area with the dead body over and over who also coincidentally had motive, etc. Most of the famous cases of what you mention rely on humans identifying a person and DNA later exonerating them.
So I'm loathe to rule out the use of more accurate ways to pinpoint investigations when the status quo is someone who thinks they saw the person at the scene, when we know how unreliable that is.
That feels like throwing out DNA because there are many explanations of why it might be at a crime scene in favor of good old fashioned witness identification, never mind one is a lot better than the other, even if both of them have been misused terribly at times.
That's why I think we should want the cops to use methods that cause fewer people to get wrongly investigated, because it is a burden. It's true, your phone being too close to a crime scene doesn't make you a criminal, but it's probably a better reason for investigating you than traditional things like "I saw a guy who looked like that at the scene" which has much more frequently caused the harm you cite, and yet it's been a staple of courts longer than any of us have been alive.
I think in much the same way that your life has been touched by a murderer and it has influenced your opinion, if you were wrongly accused of a crime it would likewise have influence.
That being said, I'm sympathetic to your point here and I'm not advocating for eye witness testimony becoming the only source of truth. If I could somehow know for sure that this would ONLY be used for the worst of violent crimes it would soften my opinion, but I am very sure that the more normalized this sort of dragnet investigation becomes the standard of what "requires" it's use will get lower and lower.
If policing were entirely focused on violent and property crimes many of my opinions might change, but realistically I think we can agree that whatever investigative technique we are talking about will primarily end up being used to prosecute drug crimes, because that is much safer and more profitable for the police. Do you really want to be on a suspect list everytime someone thinks they saw a drug deal somewhere and you happened to be near?
Sorry, I’m not chilled at all by the prospect that the court can subpoena my data from Goole. It can already issue a warrant to arrest me, and to search my actual home.
The trouble is that you aren't chilled at all today.
Tomorrow's government may decide that attending certain protests, or having "associated" with certain people was always a crime. It doesn't even need to be "retroactive", since enforcement and interpretation of the law is always adjustable in the present.
This sort of thing is happening today in certain countries. Why are you so sure it won't happen to you in yours?
It kind of sounds like you are saying you don't care if other people are hurt, as long as it doesn't impact you. I hope that isn't what you actually mean.
That's not a good faith, or even vaguely accurate, reading of the parent comment.
I'm not sure how else to read this:
Most people are like me: they don't care about being protected from the courts, because the courts don't pose risk to them, and as a matter of statistical fact, they are correct.
The problem is, unfortunately, those data lakes are in the category "safe until they aren't." Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws in the European sphere, for example, because they know that the courts (and executive) don't pose a risk to most Germans... Until suddenly they do, and the only defense is not having aggregated the data in the first place.
To be clear, no disagreement with your self-risk-assessment, and reasonable people can disagree on where their paranoia threshold is.
Germany has some of the most restrictive data collection laws. And yet... Germany has a central registry of all Jews, because of the address registration and the religion tax. The last thing you would expect them to have!
Huh? My understanding is that they have religion data only for catholics/protestants, and only on local level, not in a central database. Which yes that should be killed too but no other faith is recorded, since they only collect taxes for those two.
The courts are already a risk there cause of how they handle speech
Places that aren't the United States aren't obliged to treat their history of speech the way the US does.
The US's protections are rooted in observations of local authority (and Crown-backed authority) trying to disrupt what the revolutionaries self-observed to be peaceful demonstrations, peaceful entry of thought into the public discourse, and public discourse itself. It's grounded in Enlightenment-era belief that unsuppressed discourse is the best path to real truths, and respect for real truths via the distributed, democratic comprehension of them are the foundation of good governance and good society.
Germany watched a significantly post-Enlightenment, free, democratic people talk its way from democracy straight into fascism, and concluded that some kinds of discourse are so toxic to the actual practice of discovery of the aforementioned truths that they are to be excluded from the public sphere.
Both cultures came by their conclusions honestly and there's some merit to both points of view.
Germany had restricted speech before WWI or WWII too, and they're mistaken if they think it's going to protect them from fascism this time.
Most people don't have your luxury of not worrying about government overreach.
It sure would have been useful for governments in the South to grab the location data of enslaved people trying to escape—would they, like the average user today, have known to turn off these settings?
It's great for Texas to buy data from brokers about women trying to access reproductive healthcare across state lines from apps carelessly sharing it. The courts don't pose a risk to you until the law changes and suddenly they do.
This is about the government getting data through a loophole that violates the 4th amendment—the difference between a society that collects everything and presumes guilt, and one that targets specific people when they're suspected of a specific crime.
If you'd like, I can develop a product that will track your location and report it to the police in real-time for you.
My biggest gripe is with the idea that any data shared with a third party is not subject to privacy.
With cameras going up everywhere, operated by the government and with AI enabled, I wonder if geofencing is the biggest privacy threat we have.
>With cameras going up everywhere, operated by the government and with AI enabled, I wonder if geofencing is the biggest privacy threat we have.
There's a cynical joke in the refrigeration/hvac industry to the tune of "it's good for the environment as long as DuPont has a monopoly on it/the 3rd world isn't making it" in reference to refrigerants' reliable pattern of being identified as bad for the environment and get regulated away right as patents expire, manufacturing proliferates and they and the equipment that uses them become cheap.
Geofencing warrants and cell location data collection give me the same sort of "they're getting rid of it to move onto the next thing" vibes. Not that we shouldn't get rid of it.
I've been listening to this live and it's clear how Kavenaugh will vote regardless of the validity of the arguments. His mind is set and he's well into coming up with barely related hypotheticals introducing exigency into a case where there was none (the geofencing request for spying on a large group of people was done a week after the crime occured).
You're presupposing there's a valid argument for the other side. The text of the fourth amendment clearly connects the scope of privacy to property rights:
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
Cell location data belongs to AT&T and Verizon, not the accused individual. As to such third-party data, there's a general principle rooted in Roman law that third parties can be compelled to provide documents in their possession to aid a court proceeding: https://commerciallore.com/2015/06/04/a-brief-history-of-sub... ("In an early incarnation of mandatory minimum sentencing there were only two offences that automatically attracted the death penalty, treason and failing to answer a subpoena. Subpoenas as a tool of justice were considered so important that failing to answer it was a most egregious violation of civic duty. A person accused of murder may or may not be guilty, but if a person refused to answer a subpoena then they were seen as denying Jupiter’s justice itself.").
Those principles were incorporated into what's called the third-party doctrine half a century ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_doctrine. But by then it was already an ancient principle.
> You're presupposing there's a valid argument for the other side.
How about this part of the amendment?
> "The right of the people to be secure in their persons against unreasonable searches shall not be violated"
Isn't treating people like suspects (investigating them, searching their belongings, tracking them, etc.) merely because a third party claimed (and of course GPS is never inaccurate) that they passed within some vague proximity of a crime scene a violation of their security in their persons? Do you really have reasonable suspicion that every individual among the dozens (or more) you dragged into your search may have committed a crime if it's clear the others are there for unrelated reasons?
Treating people like potential suspects isn't a "search" of their "persons" (bodies), "houses, papers, and effects." How would it even work if police needed a warrant to even consider someone as a suspect and investigate them?
You understand "being secure in your person" is not merely "I don't get physically touched", right? If I stalked you every day without ever touching you, you wouldn't feel so secure in your person, would you? If I was a police officer, you still wouldn't feel so secure, would you? If you knew I was doing this remotely instead of in-person, by monitoring you over video cameras across the city and tracking all your moves with your own GPS devices, you surely wouldn't feel so secure, would you?
People (maybe not you, but most humans) feel threatened when all their moves are being tracked. There's an implicit threat of physical harm even if it hasn't occurred thus far. Not to mention there's also the risk of a bad actor (read: including law enforcement insider) stealing your tracking data that was supposedly only ever being used for good. It's a real threat to your security, and you have a right to be secure. If another person is going to threaten a free person's security, they sure as hell need both the legal authority and reasonable suspicion of a crime. That is the amendment.
Where to draw the line for "reasonable" here can vary somewhat, but I think most people would agree that if you have 3 people all in close proximity to a crime, you could justify having reasonable suspicion of each individual of being involved. If you have a hundred people walking in a half-mile radius, you clearly don't. Idk where the line exactly is, and circumstances can affect things, but somewhere between those seems like a reasonable place to start.
You used the word "feel" four times in your post, but it appears zero times in the fourth amendment:
> "The right of the people [1] to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, [2] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The clause labeled [2] limits the scope of the clause labeled [1]. It's not a free-floating right to "feel secure" against anything--people following you, etc. It's a right "to be secure in [your] person" "against" a specific intrusion: "unreasonable searches and seizures."
If it said: "you have a right not to be mauled by lions," that wouldn't mean you have a right not to be eaten by hippos. Much less that you have a right not to "feel" threatened by the prospect of being eaten by hippos.
> You used the word "feel" four times in your post, but it appears zero times in the fourth amendment. The clause labeled [2] limits the scope of the clause labeled [1]. It's not a free-floating right to "feel secure" against anything--people following you, etc. It's a right "to be secure in [your] person" "against" a specific intrusion: "unreasonable searches and seizures."
It the word "feel" distracted you from the underlying point.
First: "being secure in your person" does mean to include feelings as well as actual harm (“protected from... danger” as well as "free from fear"). See [1] for example. I am approximately 99% sure the authors of that amendment would have felt that government officials following them around would have directly violated that amendment, and I would be shocked to hear you're actually arguing otherwise. (Are you?)
Second: you're either misunderstanding or completely ignoring the actual physical danger here. Again, I refer you to my previous question, which you did not address: if I was stalking you 24/7, would you say you ARE secure in your person/effects/etc.? If other people claimed you ARE secure, would you agree with them? Would it change if I was a police officer? Are you seriously going to argue that my stalking is only impacting your feelings regarding your security, not your actual security?
[1] https://ij.org/issues/ijs-project-on-the-4th-amendment/the-r...
I'm focusing on the word "feel" because it illustrates that you're reading words and ideas into the sentence that aren't there.
"Be[ing] secure in your person" doesn't encompass feelings. The text of the fourth amendment is objective. It refers to objective actions. It's not talking about people's subjective "feelings" about actions.
Your argument doesn't even make sense on its own terms. Let's say the fourth amendment does cover how people feel about government action. Then how do we decide whether people "feel" threatened by geofencing warrants? Do we take a poll? I suspect if you did take a poll, you'd find that most people trust law enforcement and don't "feel" threatened by the police using geofencing warrants to catch bank robbers.
You're also overlooking the rest of the text. The amendment doesn't end at "be secure." It doesn't guarantee being secure--much less feeling secure--from an entire universe of things. The sentence is limited to security "against" two specific things: "unreasonable searches and seizures." It doesn't say anything about the government investigating you or following you around using data available from somewhere else.
We don't have to guess at what "the authors of [the] amendment would have felt." They wrote down what they meant! When they mean to be broad and general, they used broad and general words. The first amendment says: "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech." That's very broad! If the first amendment said "abridging the freedom of speech to publish books" that would be narrower.
Sorry, but given you twice refused to respond to my question and also ignored my link, I'm not going to keep going here.
If you take the 4th Amendment to specifically and solely bar inconveniencing property owners without a warrant, then you are arguing that the 4th Amendment is a water sandwich. When the 4th Amendment was actually written, it was not actually possible for the investigative powers of the state to not inconvenience a property holder. But we've been able to violate people's right to privacy without them even knowing for almost a century now.
Furthermore, the last major SCOTUS case regarding this issue[0] had some very interesting dissenting opinions specifically on the question of "Does the 4th Amendment only guarantee property rights". Justice Thomas made the exact same argument you made. Justice Gorsuch took your argument and twisted it inside out. He specifically argued that because the 4th Amendment is a protection on property, the third-party doctrine should be thrown out entirely, and that you should still own your personal information even if you have to lend it to a phone company in order for them to connect you.
So yes, there are valid arguments for the other side, even in the "4A only protects property" regime.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carpenter_v._United_States
Well this court has never overturned decisions made 50 years ago.
Ah, you're a bit confused about the case the court is hearing. This is explcitly not about telco basestation records. It is about the records for location data recorded on the smart phones of individuals. GPS recorded on their personal property, not multi-lateration from telco owned third party property. It's all very accessible if you give it a listen. It's streaming live on youtube.
I haven't heard the argument so maybe it's getting into that. But my understanding--based on a few articles--is that the case is (at least partly?) about geofencing information stored on Google's servers. E.g. https://www.npr.org/2026/04/27/nx-s1-5777656/supreme-court-g...
"But after two months of working the case, all leads had gone dry. So police applied for a geofence warrant directed at Google and all its collected and stored cellphone location information.
A state magistrate judge found probable cause to issue the warrant and authorized the disclosure of Google's location information for an area the size of about three football fields around the Midlothian bank at the time of the robbery."
This is not about local storage. It's about location data gathered from apps and phone OS operators, which is much more akin to telco records than confiscating everyone's phone to look for evidence.
> You're presupposing there's a valid argument for the other side.
Typically a good presupposition when the Supreme Court decides to hear the case.
Cell tower info isn't at issue here.
And why should we defer to ancient principles in a case regarding cell phone metadata that can be used in innumerable ways to violate privacy? To me it seems obvious that if the 4th Amendment were written today by anyone other than cops, this exact case would have been covered.
I doubt it. According to the 1960s courts, they did because this “ancient concept” was essentially common sense. If you tell someone something, you shouldn’t expect a constitutional right to it remaining a secret. If I told someone I robbed a bank and my confidant calls the police, why shouldn’t they use this information? Should the courts respect mafia NDAs?
The banking aspects didn’t show up until the mid 70s. Personally, I think technology changed society in ways the constitution isn’t prepared for. In 1790 a banker was a dude you worked with in a local institution. In 1975 half of California was a Bank of America customer.
The constitution didn’t anticipate this and you’d need an amendment to create some sort of agent or attorney like privilege. It’s a fairly nuanced issue — from the humans point of view, an email is like a letter, and Google Drive is like a file cabinet. But the courts are forced to think about the where the logical artifact (ie the folder) is located. A USB drive in a drawer is protected, but the file in Google is not.
> there's a general principle rooted in Roman law
There goes my fucking morning :P
I'm glad he doesn't just apply Hollywood thriller plots to his arguments for unchecked executive power.
He does have his Kavanaugh stop legacy to uphold.
SCOTUS has been this way for a while now.
They start with the desired decision and work backwards to justify it.
Or they refuse to hear cases that they know will go the way they don't want.
As long as a judge issued the warrant for geofence data, I see less wrong with it. It passed judicial scrutiny, AND can itself be challenged.
As of now, most of these jurisdictions are a FLOCK search away, with absolutely no warrant, oversight, warrant, or anything. Like, all of these abominations https://maps.deflock.org/?lat=37.5620&lng=-77.4559&zoom=11.2...
> As long as a judge issued the warrant for geofence data, I see less wrong with it. It passed judicial scrutiny, AND can itself be challenged.
The cops say "someone committed a crime in this area, we need to find the perp". They can pretty much say this for any part of the town at any given time. A judge signs off on the warrant, because why wouldn't they? You don't get to challenge anything: no one is going to tell you "hey, your phone was in that area, come to the courthouse and make your case if you think the police shouldn't be given that info".
Again the key here is "Due Process".
Im comparing due process with a judges' signature, compared to shit like FLOCK and other non-search warranted processes. And if the warrant was deemed wrongfully granted, the case itself can be dismissed or mistrial.
How much corporate data was just purchased rather than search warranted? Data brokers and parallel construction is a lot larger issue.
And about the cops giving that "someone committed a crime in this area, we need to find the perp" - pig's will always give bullshit reasons. Thats why I went to the judge's determination, rather than oinkers demanding everything and manufacturing whatever they want.
imo there should be a requirement for the gov to tell you within a reasonable time period (a year?) whenever a search warrant is granted for your data. currently there is no ability to check the government because you never learn that you were searched.
I listened to the arguments, here's my notes live: --
One justice asked petitioner that because 'If you don't want the government to have your location history, you just flip that off. You dont have to have that feature on your phone. so whats the issue?'
They continue to talk about the Terms of Service stating that Google will comply with legitimate government requests. And both the petitioner and justices seem to agree that ANY data would be then up for grabs by the government (without a warrant) if it is stored in the cloud (including email, docs, photos, calendar, business records, etc). Sotomayor points out that the government would need NO warrant to access these records.
The google feature doesn't exist anymore. But in the amicus brief some 30 providers still have features in similar pattern of record storage. 'Google can track you down to 3 feet'. Google had to search "500 million" accounts for the search in question.
Justice Jackson asks why they aren't looking at the case as a 'reasonable expectation of privacy'? The petitioner agrees, and points out that the data is protected by a password. So the data is NOT public.
"Data on the network is property." - how we get laws against stealing data/trespassing data
Probable Cause was an interesting argument. about 90 minutes in. It went by too quickly. The justice seems to say that google's servers are one 'place'. The justice also sees the output of 3 people despite google 'searching' 19 people as the only people who matter.
Responder is leaning heavy into the 'consent' for google to store location history. Is it possible to turn location history off on modern android phones? Responder also argues that because you're in public AT SOME POINT, then your location data is no different than a cctv data pointing at the street. Then a justice interrupts to make the responder say that YES the government CAN perform these searches on anyone it wants any time it wants without a warrant. For example people who seek abortion, or were at a political event. And the responder agrees!
Responder says the email, photos, and docs still need a warrant because they're like your thoughts or mail, where location is different because people are 'constantly advertising' their location to google.
To me, the responder is arguing two things:
1. That whatever you do in public is always available without a warrant
2. Your location history stored in google (or others) are generated in public and are therefore don't require a warrant.
Responder says location records are records google creates on your phone. Justice asks why no one of the 500M people who were searched have complained? (idk, maybe because we have no way of knowing we were searched?)
> 'If you don't want the government to have your location history, you just flip that off. You dont have to have that feature on your phone. so whats the issue?'
> https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-location-tracking-data-w...
Can someone catch me up on how the settlement against Google where turning off location on your phone didn't stop them from collecting location data, plays in this Supreme Court case?
Isn't this like cell tower data, where the user doesn't have a choice if their location data is collected?
Simplest way I have boiled it down in my head (what's actually being decided that is- there is a lot of ancillary question and discussion above that isn't ultimately relevant to the case at hand):
Is your location history
A) a bank record (less protected), or
B) a "digital diary" (strongly protected) ?
Why the hell are bank records less protected in the first place? Banks should be able to always ask for a warrant.
Bank records are correspondence between a person and the bank, not “persons, houses, papers, and effects” as protected by the Fourth Amendment. As such, they’re subject to subpoena.
Now, Congress could extend similar protections to bank records any time they like. Vote accordingly.
Correspondence between a person and a business should be considered “papers.”
That’s not how it was understood at the time of ratification. Letters and the post office were a thing then, mentioned elsewhere in the Constitution. If the framers of the 4th amendment wanted it to cover them they would have written the amendment differently.
But sealed letters ARE protected under the 4th Amendment. A warrant is necessary to open all sealed mail.
> The justice seems to say that google's servers are one 'place'.
So a large apartment tower housing, I dunno, thousands, of families can entirely be searched because it's just "one place"? Chances are this even multiple buildings, so really more like a whole apartment complex. Sorry, someone in building 56 was maybe selling drugs, we're here to dig through your wardrobe even though you're in building 12 half a block away..."
They might as well apply for warrants as "Sol 3, Earth".
> Justice asks why no one of the 500M people who were searched have complained?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_construction
> And both the petitioner and justices seem to agree that ANY data would be then up for grabs by the government (without a warrant) if it is stored in the cloud (including email, docs, photos, calendar, business records, etc).
You must have misheard this as this is not true country wide (see US v Warshak) and in practice the government treats these as needing a warrant because of that and the time requirement in the Stored Communications Act (and any major provider will explicitly refuse handing over content data without a warrant).
Gorsuch in particular thinks the Third Party Doctrine is bullshit and is happy to write that down (like in Carpenter) and today seemed to be trotting that out again (though I only read the beginning of arguments).
No, I did not. Listen for yourself.
Later the same question was put to the government, and they admitted the same: under the government's theory a warrant would not be needed.
I'll wait for the transcript but happy to listen if you have a timestamp.
> Later the same question was put to the government, and they admitted the same: under the government's theory a warrant would not be needed.
You said the opposite:
> Responder says the email, photos, and docs still need a warrant because they're like your thoughts or mail
From Orin Kerr's live tweets (Feigin for DOJ, Unikowsky for Chatrie) of what I believe you were summarizing there:
> Barrett: I'm concerned with your position being maximalist, too. Calendars, photos, email. And monitoring of homes. Are you conceding this would be a search?
> Feigin: Warrant is needed for calendars, photos, email. [OK comments: Virtual lockers]. Not conceding homes.
...
> Finally, Unikowksy rebuttal: We welcome the government's concession as to calendars, photos. But I don't understand how they distinguish that from this.
https://bsky.app/profile/orinkerr.bsky.social/post/3mkigsbw6...
https://xcancel.com/OrinKerr/status/2048793893420875849#m
> That whatever you do in public is always available without a warrant
That's not relevant to this case.
Suppose I'm traveling in the back of a van with blacked windows. Nobody can see me. No camera in the world will record me. They are arguing that I still have no expectation of privacy, which is ridiculous. Maybe if you are walking around with your face visible, sure, but that's a important condition.
Another problem with this argument is facial recognition is far from perfect.
With parallel construction on the menu, this is largely academic. There is zero percent chance police and those who profit from their patronage will give up cell location sweeps.
You cannot do a parallel construction if the telecom operator refuses to share data with you in the first place. And if SCOTUS makes the right decision here they will have legal grounds to refuse.
Again, I hope your position here is something more than 'largely academic.' Optimistically it may be, history tells us AT&T Mobile, T-mobile, Verizon, etc (pretty much all the major carriers except perhaps Dish) have been caught selling data for a buck and have still only pledged not to sell to agreggators (not law enforcement). There is incontrovertible evidence major carriers are ready and willing, and indeed have sold this to patrons they can profit from.
In theory your comment may be a rebuttal to the 'largely academic' assertion I made, in practice it's largely a distinction without much difference. Your rebuttal is a pretty remarkable, eccentric claim in the context of the vast majority of telcos that will share the data for a profit (as I put it, 'profit from the patronage [of the police]'). Whether the request comes in the form of a warrant -- again -- largely academic in such case. Your assertion requires some strong data to overcome the evidence to the contrary, if it is intended as a rebuttal.
It's also worth noting illegally executed warrants don't stop you from getting the data. I've had cops force a hospital to search me before, then get the warrant actually signed after they did it. It didn't stop the hospital from executing the warrant, it just means they evidence couldn't be directly used against me. That's another lever they have, illegally execute a warrant, get the evidence they can't use in court, then parallel construction. Sure your lawyer can argue "the fruits of this warrant have to be tossed out" but it doesn't mean dick -- they already secretly used it to get other evidence that won't be tossed out.
There's a nice map on Bluesky of what area of data Google is being asked to hand over. To be honest it's not actually huge. Personally though, that feels like not a great safeguard, not enough to make me ok with this. https://bsky.app/profile/audrelawdamercy.blacksky.app/post/3...
Worth noting that Google has changed its practice since 2019, supposedly, to keep location data on device, not accessible to them. However I have little doubt the cellphone carriers are also available to provide this data. https://www.theverge.com/2024/6/5/24172204/google-maps-delet...
Governments rapidly turning data into a liability. Data is the new oil is out, data is the new toxic waste is in. The consumer sentiment continues to get worse and worse as it becomes clearer and clearer that we are being intruded upon at will. It would be excellent to see some progress, in expanding & respecting our human rights to privacy.
> It would be excellent to see some progress, in expanding & respecting our human rights to privacy.
There are many laws in place in EU which forbids many kind of practices which infringe on privacy, but the issue is that governments don't really enforce them proactively. And in some cases where they are the ones breaking them (e.g. by enacting law that is not compatible with EU Charter or ECHR) it will take long time to get judgement which forbids the practice.
Often the path is that you complain to DPA, you appeal to court, you appeal to higher court, (repeat last step X times), during court appeals you may need to wait for CJEU ruling and finally you might be able to file appeal to ECtHR.
In one "recent" case from Finland the original DPA decision was issued in 8/2020. I'm not sure how long this exact case took, but there are some recent decisions which took 5 years to issue. It was appealed to administrative court and court made request to CJEU on 11/2021. CJEU gave ruling on 6/2023. Administrative court gave ruling on 12/2023. It was appealed and higher administrative court gave ruling on 6/2025.
So it could take 10 years to annul an illegal law or practice.
What's the difference between police looking up geofence data for the bank before and after a robbery to see who was there, and checking the bank's outdoor cameras to see what license plates were there?
One would be scope. There's a big difference between a security camera next to a secure facility (bank, police evidence facility, school) and a 1 mi radius circle around that facility. Security cameras around a bank only track stuff within a field of view from the bank. A cell geofence could be millions of people if it's drawn in midtown.
Another would be incentives. There's no reason to collect cell location data for everyone if you aren't able to use it for anything. I think just the fact that we are all monitored constantly is its own violation of our rights. We should have laws banning these practices.
Here's the text of the fourth amendment. Could you explain how "scope" and "incentives" are relevant distinguishing factors under that?
"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
As relevant here, there's two pieces. The threshold requirement is some sort of ownership. The right exists with respect to "their persons, houses, papers, and effects." Assuming digital data constitutes "papers," the accused has to show that it's "their" papers. The hypothetical you're responding to compares the bank's camera footage with the cell phone company's location information. Those seem indistinguishable for that prong.
You have a reasonable argument that "scope" and "incentives" are relevant to the second prong of what's "unreasonable." But you don't get there if you don't get past the first prong, right?
Has anything changed since the sacred texts were written or we just going to keep acting as though we can never adjust the laws
That's something that gets me every time I hear phrases like 'exact reading' of the Constitution. Do we honestly believe the writers of the document would have written exactly the same if they had today's technology? There's no way they could fathom always on two-way realtime radio communication devices, but they could easily have written the Constitution accordingly if they had them. The spirit and intent was clear. We're just willfully ignoring that intent because it would be inconvenient for big brother to do the snooping.
No, of course we don't believe they would have written it that way today. But neither you nor me nor anyone else gets to make up what we think they'd have said. They didn't say it. They're dead. They can't change what the law says. But, guess what? We can.
The law as written provides the rules of the game. Nobody should get to cheat, not the government, not a citizen, not a business, just because someone can plausibly argue that if the law were rewritten today it'd be written differently.
If the claim is true that the law would be and should be written differently today, then: Rewrite. The. Law.
If you don't have enough public support for that, then you have no business imposing your view on your fellow citizens. If you do have enough public support, but Congress is being dysfunctional (this is usually the case today), then communicate with your congresspeople and/or try vote them out, and persuade your fellow citizens to do the same. Don't cheat at the game. Play it.
> Don't cheat at the game. Play it.
It sure feels like the game is rigged against regular citizens already, though.
Which side of this question do you think "regular citizens" are on? The police are the third most trusted institution in the country, after small businesses and the military: https://news.gallup.com/poll/647303/confidence-institutions-.... And for decades, way more Americans have said that courts are too lenient on criminals than the opposite: https://news.gallup.com/poll/544439/americans-critical-crimi....
Now, to be fair, those polls aren't asking people about location data specifically. I'm open to seeing specific polling on this issue. But based on the lack of any political will to do anything about TSA, my suspicion is that "regular citizens" are okay with the police using location data to catch bank robbers.
So maybe your "the game is rigged" point cuts the other way. It's rigging the game when fancy lawyers make complicated arguments about what James Madison would have thought about geofencing, in an effort to impose shackles on the police "regular citizens" never voted for.
IMO it is tangibly different. Having yourself, your things, or your house searched in the 1700s is a much bigger inconvenience and invasion of privacy than a cellular provider noting your phone was in the general vicinity of an area. I don't think the spirit or intent of the amendment would apply in cases where there is no tangible impact to the individual being searched.
If we don't want the government to be able to do that, we should pass laws to that effect.
It is because your cellphone is a proxy for you.
A third party giving an indication as to where my phone might be is not comparable to having my house searched by soldiers.
Though again, making no judgment as to whether or not it should be allowed. I just think it should be a law, and not casting modern values on the 1700s era founders' words.
Oh, absolutely. But the general idea here is that just because it can be done without inconveniencing you should not really make a difference: there were no such things as databases and remote monitoring in those days unless you want to equate some written record in the physical possession of the authorities as a 'search of your person', which it clearly would not be. So this tech angle opens up all kinds of cans of worms (scale, speed, scope to name a few) and the founders whose words are holy had absolutely no way to anticipate this. If they had I'm fairly sure they would have had something reasonable to be said about it, those were pretty smart guys and they seem to have had the right intent on safeguarding the country for as far as they could look ahead.
I'm also pretty sure they would be 100% horrified by what it has become.
So yes, it should be law. The US supreme court however does not make laws (or at least, they shouldn't be), they interpret the constitution. And the US constitution is well overdue for a more tech aware version, it's just that with the lawmakers apparently in the pockets of the tech billionaires I think that the chances of such an overhaul approach zero.
> Do we honestly believe the writers of the document would have written exactly the same if they had today's technology? There's no way they could fathom always on two-way realtime radio communication devices, but they could easily have written the Constitution accordingly if they had them.
I suspect you're right--a bunch of high-IQ libertarian men who had just overthrown their government would write the 4th amendment differently if confronted with universal digital surveillance. But is that how we decide the legal effect of the constitution? We're stuck not only with what the founders actually wrote, but what they would have written if confronted with modern facts?
What are the parameters of this analysis? Do we assume the same James Madison--we have transported him into present day with his knowledge and thought processes intact and are simply presenting him with additional facts? Or do we assume a modern James Madison--the same kind of person today that James Madison was back then. And who decides what reincarnated James Madison would or would not have done--and why do we trust that this medium is correct?
I think it's simpler to say that the meaning of the constitution ends at what is written. What the founders intended is relevant to the extent we're trying to figure out what what they meant, at the time, by the words they used. But we won't go so far as to speculate about what the founders would have written if confronted with modern facts. We have people who can decide what to do about modern facts: they're called voters.
The fact they allowed for ammendments tells me they acknowledge that things would change in the future. Nobody can predict the future, but allowing for a "living" document to be updated with the times suggests that's their allowing some flex. Here's where we are starting, but if we get 2/3 of both chambers to agree, then update the original.
> I think it's simpler to say that the meaning of the constitution ends at what is written. What the founders intended is relevant to the extent we're trying to figure out what what they meant, at the time, by the words they used.
This is a bit of a specious argument, though, since of course what they wrote often didn't clearly articulate what they necessarily meant. You even point this out above: what is ownership, and what is unreasonable? Does entrusting your effects to a third party for safe keeping make them less your effects, etc.
> since of course what they wrote often didn't clearly articulate what they necessarily meant.
Sure. But what "they necessarily meant by the words they said" is different from "what they would have said if confronted with different facts."
The ownership issue is a good example. Does the word "their ... papers and effects" include third-party data about someone? Third-party data existed in 1789. British people love record-keeping, and the founders were sophisticated people with lawyers, accountants, merchant accounts, etc. If the fourth amendment meant to include third-party information about someone, the founders wouldn't have used the ownership language that they used.
So the real argument is that, if the founders saw how important and sensitive third-party information is today, they would have included it. They wouldn't have used the ownership language they used. That's quite a different argument! It's not just trying to understand what people meant by the words they used. It's trying to reanimate them and ask them questions to scenarios they never contemplated.
Your point cuts in the other direction. The police and the judge who issued the warrant followed current Virginia law. Voters in Virginia could "adjust the laws" to ban the use of geolocation data. They haven't done so.
So the plaintiffs in this case are trying to get the dead hand of the founders to smack the police and the judge. They're the ones invoking "sacred texts" written 237 years ago by a bunch of old white guys to ask the Supreme Court to overrule what police in Virginia did pursuant to Virginia law.
Your post raises the question: who is the "we" you're referring to--the "we" who is empowered to "adjust the laws?" Who is empowered to decide whether circumstances have, in fact, changed? And if there has been a change--which way do those changes cut? Surely it's the current voters of Virginia who get to make that decision, right?
> The police and the judge who issued the warrant followed current Virginia law.
But the Supremacy Clause says the Constitution overrides Virginia law.
If we decide the Fourth Amendment applies here, Virginia law loses.
> If we decide the Fourth Amendment applies here, Virginia law loses.
Yes, but the only way to do that is to say that the dead hand of the founders overrules current Virginia law. The plaintiffs want James Madison from his grave to impose restrictions on the police that voters in Virginia in 2026 have declined to impose.
That’s how it works.
Virginia voters similarly can’t legalize slavery or ban the New York Times. The age of the restriction is irrelevant.
> The age of the restriction is irrelevant.
Not according to the comment I was responding to: "Has anything changed since the sacred texts were written or we just going to keep acting as though we can never adjust the laws."
There's more than one bit of flow chart here.
Things can change in a way that's covered by the Constitution. Say, technology that makes Fourth Amendment violations easier to do; still potentially covered!
Things can change in a way that's not covered by the Constitution. Now you need an amendment.
The Fourth Amendment is quite broad and can thus handle all sorts of change.
You are both correct, but rayiner's comment goes to the up-thread rhetorical question:
> Has anything changed since the sacred texts were written or we just going to keep acting as though we can never adjust the laws
... the answer is "Oh boy, Chatrie sure does hope nothing has changed, and the Founders would have hated geofencing had they had any way to know what it was! Otherwise, the laws passed in the past 50 years say it's legal and fine."
No, it doesn't. The person I'm responding to is using semantics to claim the 4th amendment didn't mention scope and therefore privacy against search is irrelevant. My point is that acting as though the constitution of the us is some infallible holy text leads society down a path with learned priests interpreting arcane texts (you are here). Instead of acting as a rational society and addressing a need for citizens to have privacy in a changing technological world.
Debating who the "we" is is losing the forest for the trees--we're wading into a conversation debating the power of a state or local municipality instead of looking at the actual issue where the federal government isn't protecting is citizens because "technically the slaveowners didn't say cell phone in their document".
In the context of this thread, that would (ideally) fall under Congress’s purview, not the Supreme Court.
It is a (possibly flawed) feature of the US Constitutional form of government that there is a proper channel for adjusting the enumerated rights in it, and that process is via amendment.
I'd like it to be otherwise, but this Court has demonstrated in its overturning of Roe v. Wade that the risk of leaving it up to SCOTUS to synthesize "prenumbrae" and rights to privacy (which would have not been a thing anyone would have written in the 1700s) is that reasonable people can disagree on what those things are, unless you write them down explicitly in the document that requires a lot of effort to change.
Or we can "keep acting" like there's no duly-constituted amendment process.
A majority-conservative Supreme Court's on an originalism kick, so we're very much stuck "when the sacred texts were written".
Only when it's the way they want to rule.
>Security cameras around a bank only track stuff within a field of view from the bank. A cell geofence could be millions of people if it's drawn in midtown.
Given the ubiquity of security cameras they can just canvas local businesses and ask them to give it up. Given that warrants are involved, they can't even refuse.
A business can refuse a warrant, but it takes a legal response in court. Their attorneys need to convince a judge the warrant isn’t necessary - that it causes a bigger burden on them than the benefit to the public. Most businesses will just comply because it’s not in their interests to spend time and money on it.
Sometimes a business will challenge a court order if it’s about their own customers, employees, owners, or business dealings. The information requested should be relevant to the investigation, minimal to be helpful, and create as little burden on the business as is practical.
Also, if you’re not the subject of the investigation it’s often a subpoena rather than a warrant. There are major differences between these types of order in the US. A subpoena is an order to produce the evidence. A warrant is an order that allows law enforcement to seize it, using force if needed. As someone who has dealt with law enforcement requests for business data about customers quite a bit in the past, it’s often a simple request first and a subpoena otherwise.
Yes! That would be fantastic! They would need to approach many people, each having the ability to question the motivation! Or, they would need to convince a judge and obtain a warrant.
This is the disaggregation of power of surveillance.
In addition to the scope and specificity arguments, there is also the reasonable expectation of privacy. Geofence warrants catch up a ton of innocent citizens and violate their 4th amendment right to be secure in their persons and papers.
Outdoor cameras around a bank, and license plates both have their own justifications. Outdoor cameras surveillance is in an area with no reasonable expectation of privacy. License plates are mandated for liability and anti-theft purposes. Your personal phone is both private and has no other pre-textual reason for law enforcement to access it.
A bank's cameras cannot see into private spaces in unrelated buildings as is the explicit situation in this case where most of the people caught in the general dragnet were inside a church some distance away. And to be clearer, the data search is being done on the GPS recordings of personal property (not basestation multi-lateration records). This is the private space being searched. It's like if you carried around a journal and wrote down everywhere you went. Now the government is arguing they can draw arbitrary large general regions and read everyone's personal diary even in situations without any exigency.
This is an excellent point and I largely agree. I do wonder though: do we have a reasonable expectation of privacy when using Google mobile services?
Given how many things sorta require a phone, even basic government services, yeah I would say so. It's not just Google phones, all cell carriers are collecting location data.
The difference is ubiquitous surveillance, which is well known to lead to false positives and inhibits freedom and protest. A world where we are all under surveillance and people actually want to increase it is not a free world.
The bank doesn't have access to my phone's camera
Well, one is a search and seizure of data about a great deal more people from a third party that is not the victim.
Seems like a very clear fourth amendment violation; not that this is the ideal court to respect those precedents.
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if geofencing for all people in the area of a crime becomes legal
well then we know everyone who went to Epstein Island from their cellphone records
Congress must subpoena them ALL
especially the one that went all the way back to Trump Tower, who was it?
https://www.wired.com/video/watch/we-tracked-every-visitor-t...
Congress also has the ability to override most laws, as long as they don't violate the constitution. If they make a law that says "the police cannot use cell location data" that will be the law.
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Unrelated, but archive.ph links don't seem to work with nytimes anymore.
https://periscope.corsfix.com/?https://www.nytimes.com/2026/...
Thanks!
Most people don't understand how powerless police are to find criminals. That they catch them at all is often amazing. I have firsthand knowledge of this from a tragic loss in my family. The investigation was severely hindered because investigators could not utilize cell location data, despite knowing someone was present at the scene. Police spent an extensive amount of time trying to identify them without success. When the identity was eventually discovered through entirely different avenues, it confirmed the individual had a cell phone on them. The location data would have resolved the identification trivially. We should enable this capability and put strict "guardrails" on its use.
I have no doubt this geo fencing data solves crimes and I don't even think it's as bad as e.g. the long surveillance in Carpenter.
The problem is that the police are going to start using like they do with much more precise DNA data, and more innocent people are going to caught in the net.
The bar to convict someone (or, more likely, to convince an innocent person to take a plea deal) is not as high ("beyond a reasonable doubt") as some people think. Get caught apparently contradicting hard data or even a witness and there goes your reasonable doubt.
Huh? This is how it already works, cell companies themselves have this data. And they sell it.
The "strict guardrails" don't work. Never did.
You are entirely incorrect.
Here is the LLM's summary of the current legal issue at hand:
Attempting to determine the identity of an unknown individual co-located with a victim at a specific time requires a reverse-location query. Because the Supreme Court has not yet established a unified national doctrine for these searches post-Carpenter, lower courts are highly fragmented. Many magistrates systematically refuse to authorize geofence warrants or tower dumps, citing the lack of individualized probable cause for the peripheral, innocent devices swept up in the geographic net.
And indeed, in my case, the police were not able to conduct this geofenced investigation (which would have instantly idenitied the person).