Schneier - Google Receives Geofence Warrants

Sometimes it's hard to tell the corporate surveillance operations from the government ones:

Google reportedly has a database called Sensorvault in which it stores location data for millions of devices going back almost a decade.

The article is about geofence warrants, where the police go to companies like Google and ask for information about every device in a particular geographic area at a particular time. In 2013, we learned from Edward Snowden that the NSA does this worldwide. Its program is called CO-TRAVELLER. The NSA claims it stopped doing that in 2014 -- probably just stopped doing it in the US -- but why should it bother when the government can just get the data from Google.

Both the New York Times and EFF have written about Sensorvault.



from Schneier on Security https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2020/01/google_receives.html

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