Get the latest tech news
‘Reverse’ searches: The sneaky ways that police tap tech companies for your private data
Reverse searches cast a digital dragnet over a tech company's store of user data to catch the information that police are looking for.
With the aim of identifying criminal suspects, U.S. police departments are increasingly relying on a controversial surveillance practice to demand large amounts of users’ data from tech companies. Riana Pfefferkorn, a research scholar at the Stanford Internet Observatory, said this was a “perfect example” why civil liberties advocates have long criticized this type of court order for its ability to grant police access to people’s intrusive information. Geofence warrants, as they are more commonly known, allow police to draw a shape on a map around a crime scene or place of interest and demand huge swaths of location data from Google’s databases on anyone whose phone was in that area at a point in time.
Or read this on TechCrunch
