The new hotness in law enforcement is reverse warrants. Those are warrants that aren’t targeted at an individual but specify some criterion and seek to identify all individuals who meet that criterion. The most common example is the so-called geofence warrant that demands the user data of everyone who was near a certain location at a certain time. Google, of course, collects that kind of information and has, as a result, seen an explosion in geofence warrants. In 2018 they had 982, by 2020 the number had risen to 11,554.
But wait; there’s more! If being at the wrong place at the wrong time doesn’t worry you, how about warrants asking for the user details on anyone who used some search term? Google and others are getting those too and privacy experts are worried that it’s a growing trend.
There are a couple of obvious points here. First, this is yet another example of the Iron Law of Data Collection. Google and others collected location and search data to be used to target ads. Then, of course, as the Iron Law predicts, new uses were found for the data and suddenly perfectly innocent people are being swept up in police investigations.
The second point is obvious too: stay away from Google and other companies that collect your data. Even with (the deferred) CSAM scanning, the iPhone is a much safer bet than an Android-based phone because they don’t collect location information that ties back to the user so geofence warrants don’t catch iPhone users in their snare (although less accurate cell tower information is still available).
And if you’re still using Google search, stop that right now. Google records all your searches, which means that they’re available to law enforcement. Yes, yes, I know you’re not doing anything wrong but that’s beside the point; you can still be swept up in some wide-ranging search that just happens to involve some search term you were using. Instead, use a search engine, like DuckDuckGo, Startpage, or Brave Search that doesn’t record your search queries.