Why Google Will Stop Telling Law Enforcement Which Users Were Near a Crime

Earlier this week Google Maps stopped storing user location histories in the cloud. But why did Google make this move?

Bloomberg reports that it was 'so that the company no longer has access to users' individual location histories, cutting off its ability to respond to law enforcement warrants that ask for data on everyone who was in the vicinity of a crime.'
The company said Thursday that for users who have it enabled, location data will soon be saved directly on users' devices, blocking Google from being able to see it, and, by extension, blocking law enforcement from being able to demand that information from Google. 'Your location information is personal,' said Marlo McGriff, director of product for Google Maps, in the blog post. 'We're committed to keeping it safe, private and in your control.'

The change comes three months after a Bloomberg Businessweek investigation that found police across the US were increasingly using warrants to obtain location and search data from Google, even for nonviolent cases, and even for people who had nothing to do with the crime. 'It's well past time,' said Jennifer Lynch, the general counsel at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that defends digital civil liberties. 'We've been calling on Google to make these changes for years, and I think it's fantastic for Google users, because it means that they can take advantage of features like location history without having to fear that the police will get access to all of that data.'

Google said it would roll out the changes gradually through the next year on its own Android and Apple Inc.'s iOS mobile operating systems, and that users will receive a notification when the update comes to their account. The company won't be able to respond to new geofence warrants once the update is complete, including for people who choose to save encrypted backups of their location data to the cloud.

The EFF general counsel also pointed out to Bloomberg that 'nobody else has been storing and collecting data in the same way as Google.' (Apple, for example, is technically unable to provide the same data to police.)

Read more of this story at Slashdot.