Google report: Cops ask for a lot of location data and we comply
Google has released a report on the number of geofence warrants it receives by the federal government, US states and the District of Columbia. The numbers show a terrifying but not shocking increase in the number of requests it receives.
In the distributed “Supplemental Information on Geofence Warrants in the United States” PDF, Google says “These so-called ‘geofence’ warrants are one subcategory of the total search warrant requests we share in our User Data Requests Transparency Report” meaning that the 20,932 geofence warrants Google has received are just a small fraction of the more than 144,828 requests for user information received in the same time period between 2018 and 2020. (Google has not released general numbers for the second half of 2020 but includes that time period in its geofence report.)
A geofence warrant allows law enforcement agencies to request a list of cell phones that were in a specified area in a given time range. Google, even though it’s not a cell phone provider, tracks and stores much of this data in a massive system called Sensorvault.
Google will then return semi-anonymized information of anyone in that area – whether you are suspected of a crime or not! Police can then choose a series of accounts to learn more information about.
Turning off location history
You can choose to have Google stop remembering your location history – including places you go and places you search. To do so, go to the Data & personalization section of your Google account settings. Under “Activity Controls” click Location History, then turn the slider to off. You may want to use the Auto-delete function to remove your old location data from Google as well.
The Data
Below is a table of each state, DC and federal requests for the years 2018-2020 as provided by Google. Of significance, every state made at least one request in both 2019 and 2020, and in 2019 every state made more requests than in 2019.
The majority of decreases in states from 2019 to 2020 were where there was a small number of requests to begin with: for example, Hawaii fell from 2 to 1 and Rhode Island from 9 to 8, making them pretty statistically insignificant.
| Jurisdiction | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 |
|---|---|---|---|
| All Federal | 41 | 366 | 521 |
| Alabama | 27 | 246 | 346 |
| Alaska | 2 | 6 | 5 |
| Arizona | 34 | 174 | 243 |
| Arkansas | 20 | 123 | 228 |
| California | 209 | 1,537 | 1,909 |
| Colorado | 27 | 164 | 308 |
| Connecticut | 0 | 34 | 36 |
| Delaware | 0 | 5 | 14 |
| DC | 0 | 11 | 17 |
| Florida | 81 | 626 | 811 |
| Georgia | 12 | 343 | 584 |
| Hawaii | 0 | 2 | 1 |
| Idaho | 0 | 28 | 53 |
| Illinois | 11 | 202 | 486 |
| Indiana | 9 | 181 | 155 |
| Iowa | 7 | 46 | 82 |
| Kansas | 24 | 37 | 55 |
| Kentucky | 1 | 36 | 89 |
| Louisiana | 5 | 140 | 72 |
| Maine | 0 | 1 | 1 |
| Maryland | 21 | 239 | 383 |
| Massachusetts | 3 | 74 | 163 |
| Michigan | 35 | 448 | 478 |
| Minnesota | 22 | 207 | 173 |
| Mississippi | 0 | 51 | 171 |
| Missouri | 6 | 52 | 118 |
| Montana | 2 | 17 | 40 |
| Nebraska | 2 | 23 | 46 |
| Nevada | 15 | 129 | 169 |
| New Hampshire | 3 | 24 | 42 |
| New Jersey | 19 | 115 | 173 |
| New Mexico | 3 | 12 | 41 |
| New York | 50 | 172 | 265 |
| North Carolina | 50 | 197 | 251 |
| North Dakota | 0 | 16 | 55 |
| Ohio | 7 | 186 | 400 |
| Oklahoma | 3 | 40 | 57 |
| Oregon | 2 | 64 | 100 |
| Pennsylvania | 7 | 139 | 262 |
| Rhode Island | 0 | 9 | 8 |
| South Carolina | 7 | 172 | 176 |
| South Dakota | 1 | 13 | 17 |
| Tennessee | 1 | 80 | 95 |
| Texas | 97 | 904 | 824 |
| Utah | 1 | 32 | 63 |
| Vermont | 1 | 19 | 17 |
| Virginia | 72 | 304 | 484 |
| Washington | 11 | 118 | 196 |
| West Virginia | 0 | 7 | 11 |
| Wisconsin | 31 | 214 | 250 |
| Wyoming | 0 | 11 | 10 |
| Totals | 982 | 8,396 | 11,554 |