A court in California ruled that a geofence warrant issued in a case involving a burglary in 2018 violated both the Fourth Amendment and the California electronic communications privacy act (CalECPA).
The ruling was handed down in People v. Dawes, which involved a burglary in a residential neighborhood. The suspects were caught on camera but the images were not clear enough for the suspects to be identified. So the San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) got a geofence warrant.
Geofence warrants do not begin with a suspect. Instead, the police request Google, or a similar service, to provide the data on all devices in a specific geographical area at a specific time, whether or not the device is linked to the crime or not. For Google to comply with the warrant, it has to search its entire user location database.
A geofence warrant has three steps. In the first step, Google provides the police with a list of de-identified device IDs for all devices in a specific geographical area. In the second step, the police narrow down the list...
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