Tag: Google location data

Google to stop geofence warrants by letting users store location data on devices

Stephanie Beck
Geofence warrants - Location Data own device

Law enforcement have been accessing location data stored in massive amounts by tech giants. Google will soon be providing users with the opportunity to store their location data on their devices instead of on its own servers, putting to the end the geofence warrants trend it played a large part in creating. Use of these warrants has recently taken off. This will effectively cease a surveillance practice that has long existed and that has permitted law enforcement such as police to be able to access the company’s massive stores of…

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Google location data for 131 countries published in coronavirus lockdown reports

Jorge Gonzalez
Business Computing

Alphabet Inc. provided the data in order to help determine whether lockdowns are working. At the end of last week, Alphabet Inc. published Google location data reports for 131 countries to help show whether visits to workplaces, parks and shops had reduced throughout March. That was the month in which many governments issued stay-at-home orders to their populations to help slow the spread of COVID-19. This analysis from billions of individual phones is the largest available public dataset. The Google location data analysis provides health authorities with the largest available…

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