Google moves to end geofence warrants, a surveillance problem it largely created
Google will soon allow users to store their location data on their devices rather than on Google’s servers, effectively ending a long-running surveillance practice that allowed police and law enforcement to tap Google’s vast banks of location data to identify potential criminals.
The use of so-called “geofence warrants” have exploded in recent years, in large part thanks to the ubiquity of smartphones coupled with hungry data companies like Google vacuuming up and storing huge amounts of its users’ location data,…