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Google Will Stop Telling Law Enforcement Which Users Were Near a Crime (finance.yahoo.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Google Will Stop Telling Law Enforcement Which Users Were Near a Crime::(Bloomberg) -- Alphabet Inc.’s Google is changing its Maps tool 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.Most Read from BloombergNetanyahu, Under Pressure Over Hostage Deaths, Vows to Press OnMike Johnson May Be the Next House Speaker to Lose His Job‘Underwater’ Car Loans Signal US Consumers Slammed by High RatesUS Navy Shoots Do

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (13 children)

Not really. Google is making this change so they have no way to share incidental bystanders location data when its requested/demanded by law enforcement. Google is the only tech company cooperating with police to provide this type of "geofence/general area" location data.

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.

Google will change its app so that it can no longer tell law enforcement its users location data, inline with more privacy focused companies like Apple and their maps app. This change comes after years of advocacy from digital rights groups, but appears to be mainly motivated by negative press coverage.

The headline is specifically about what the article is about.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 11 months ago (12 children)

Wow, surprising that for once Apple is the good guy here. There's a good reason this is a bad idea, and it's not reallt hard to see why. Circumstantial evidence isn't evidence of an actual crime for a reason.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (10 children)

Apple has been pushing digital privacy as a selling point for a while, and actually living up to it a bit.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 11 months ago

Well, no, not really. They're more private than Google, but have also never had issues in the past with geofence dragonets, and only because of public backlash stopped the idea of digging through people's gallerys to accuse everybody of being a pedophile. Yes, out of the box Apple (may) be a little better, but their descicions change with the wind, and at least on Android we have control to stop what Google does in most cases vs no options on the Apple side.

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