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California requires law enforcement to report the controversial warrants to a state database—but The Markup found massive discrepancies in how they’re reportedBy Maddy Varner and Alfred Ng
November 3, 2021 08:00 ET
In the last three years, Google says, public agencies in California have increasingly demanded location data collected from people’s phones and other devices through geofence warrants—an evidence-gathering mechanism that privacy advocates argue violates civil liberties. Between 2018 and 2020, the company said in a recent transparency report, it had received 3,655 geofence warrant requests from agencies operating in the state.
But California’s OpenJustice dataset, where law enforcement agencies are required by state law to disclose executed geofence warrants or requests for geofence information, tells a completely different story.
A Markup review of the state’s data between 2018 and 2020 found only 41 warrants that could clearly constitute a geofence warrant. We looked for any warrant described as targeting information such as “users within a geographical area” and “google id’s in a certain area.”
“When the providers are telling you one thing, and the government is telling you another, then something’s broken and it needs to be fixed,” said Albert Gidari, who served as consulting director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and recently retired. He has also represented Google as a lawyer in the past.