Sometimes it’s hard to tell the corporate surveillance operations from the government ones:
Google reportedly has a database called Sensorvault in which it stores location data for millions of devices going back almost a decade.
The article is about geofence warrants, where the police go to companies like Google and ask for information about every device in a particular geographic area at a particular time. In 2013, we learned from Edward Snowden that the NSA does this worldwide. Its program is called CO-TRAVELLER. The NSA claims it stopped doing that in 2014 — probably just stopped doing it in the US — but why should it bother when the government can just get the data from Google.
Both the New York Times and EFF have written about Sensorvault.
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