It seems morally similar to scooping up all CCTV from nearby businesses.
If this is going through a warrant process, and it's geofenced around a specific crime they're investigating, it's hard to feel too worried about it. The worst case scenario I can see is that it makes it easy to generate false hypotheses and put innocent people under suspicion, but then so can canvassing the neighborhood and trawling all the nearby CCTV.
CCTV is more analogous to a witness that provides a fixed point of view. Location data feels much closer to providing the point of view of the suspect and comes much closer, to my mind, to being protected by our 5th amendment rights to avoid self incrimination.
Also, given that Google don't make it obvious when they're storing information in the phone or on their servers, information that intuitively feels like it's inside the phone should be protected by the 4th amendment's prohibitions on illegal searches. That's if the phone is owned by the suspect. If the phone is owned by the victim or anyone willing to give consent to search, I have no problem with police using it.
> 4th amendment's prohibitions on illegal searches.
The due process required by the 4th amendment is performed when the court issues a warrant, which they did here. If Google were providing this without a warrant, or in response to an NSL or the feds were using the 3rd-party doctrine to argue that these searches weren't protected by the 4th amendment then I'd be worried.
I get that existing case law is different, but I was providing my own interpretation of how I believe the 4th and 5th amendments should apply to a technology that the people who wrote those amendments could not have envisioned. I strongly believe that implementation details shouldn't be legal loopholes that allow law enforcement additional leeway. In this case, location information being stored on Google's servers is an implementation detail that isn't immediately obvious to non-technical people.
> The due process required by the 4th amendment is performed when the court issues a warrant, which they did here
The warrant was to search Google's servers, not the potential suspects' phones. What I'm saying is that I believe this data is logically part of the phone despite the fact that it resides on Google's servers because of the way that Google chose to implement their services. If they want to get a warrant for a specific person's phone because they believe the location information in the phone will prove that the suspect was in the area, that's different. But fishing for suspects using location data feels wrong to me. For one, it is almost guaranteed to also cover innocent people. Unless it's a remote area where only the perpetrator and victim were present, someone innocent will get unnecessarily dragged into the investigation.
The difference is in that, while CCTV cameras are usually visible and obvious (many areas even have signs indicating as such), most people are unaware they are being tracked in the manner described in the article.
CCTV and GPS "fencing" would be comparable if Google were to issue statements clarifying that your location is being tracked and recorded, and may be surrendered to the police without your knowledge.
CCTVs don't invade my privacy by opening up my entire digital life to the police, including conversations and pictures that have nothing to do with the crime scene. It's completely different.
> CCTVs don't invade my privacy by opening up my entire digital life to the police
Well, neither do the sorts of warrant mentioned in the article. They don't even get phone numbers, just arbitrary phone IDs and where they were located to be inside the region.
If they were scooping up everyone's digital fingerprints en masse without probable cause and without a warrant, then that's something else entirely, but that didn't happen here.
If this is going through a warrant process, and it's geofenced around a specific crime they're investigating, it's hard to feel too worried about it. The worst case scenario I can see is that it makes it easy to generate false hypotheses and put innocent people under suspicion, but then so can canvassing the neighborhood and trawling all the nearby CCTV.