Google · The Information · Supreme Court · NPR Technology
At that point, Google agreed to unmask the identities of those three individuals, including Okello Chatrie, who subsequently
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Of course, geofencing can sweep up lots of completely innocent people as suspects, and critics warn that geofencing could be used by the government to spy on law-abiding citizens engaging in, among other things, lawful protests and political activity.
Key facts
- Google initially identified 19 cellphone users as potential suspects, but the company did not identify those individuals by name
- In numerous cases, so far, he observes, the Supreme Court "concluded that in the modern era, it was indispensable to protect privacy of locational information derived from cell phones to avoid
- At that point, Google agreed to unmask the identities of those three individuals, including Okello Chatrie, who subsequently was arrested
- Dreeben, the Justice Department veteran, acknowledges that in this case, lots of innocent people were driving to and from places within the geofence line
Summary
The Supreme Court hears arguments Monday about a relatively new law enforcement technique that allows police to tap into giant tech-firm databases to find out who was near the scene of a crime and may have been involved. The technique is called geofencing, and it allows the government to draw a virtual fence around a geographic area where a crime was committed. The geofencing in this case relied on a Google feature called 'location history.' Every two minutes, on average, the location feature recorded where you were by using multiple information sources to pinpoint and record the location of every person with an active cell phone.
"This was a little bit of an investigative lottery ticket when they had no other way of finding a suspect," says Stanford law professor Orin Kerr, who has written extensively about searches.