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Police have used information from the search giant's Sensorvault database to aid in criminal cases across the country, according to a report Saturday by The New York Times. The database has detailed location records from hundreds of millions of phones around the world, the report said. It's meant to collect information on the users of Google's products so the company can better target them with ads, and see how effective those ads are.

But police have been tapping into the database to help find missing pieces in investigations. Law enforcement can get "geofence" warrants seeking location data. Those kinds of requests have spiked in the last six months, and the company has received as many as 180 requests in one week, according to the report.

[...] For geofence warrants, police carve out a specific area and time period, and Google can gather information from Sensorvault about the devices that were present during that window, according to the report. The information is anonymous, but police can analyze it and narrow it down to a few devices they think might be relevant to the investigation. Then Google reveals those users' names and other data, according to the Times.

[...] It's not uncommon for law enforcement to seek help from tech companies during investigations. But the use of Sensorvault data has raised concerns about innocent people being implicated. For example, the Times interviewed a man who was arrested last year in a murder investigation after Google's data had reportedly landed him on the police's radar. But he was released from jail after a week, when investigators pinpointed and arrested another suspect.

Title		Law Enforcement Taps Google's Sensorvault for Location Data, Report Says
Date		Monday April 15 2019, @02:02PM
Author		chromas
Topic
from the it's-okay;-he-was-released-after-a-week dept.

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