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March 8, 2020 02:34 am

Google Tracked His Bike Ride Past a Burglary, and That Made Him a Suspect

JustAnotherOldGuy shares a tale for our time: "I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the crime," said Zachary McCoy. Yep, that's all it took. Google's legal investigations support team emailed him to let him know that local police had demanded information related to his Google account. The man's lawyer dug around and learned that the notice had been prompted by a "geofence warrant," a police surveillance tool that casts a virtual dragnet over crime scenes, sweeping up Google location data — drawn from users' GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and cellular connections — from everyone nearby. NBC News reports:An avid biker, he used an exercise-tracking app, RunKeeper, to record his rides. The app relied on his phone's location services, which fed his movements to Google. He looked up his route on the day of the March 29, 2019, burglary and saw that he had passed the victim's house three times within an hour, part of his frequent loops through his neighborhood, he said. "It was a nightmare scenario," McCoy recalled. "I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the crime. And I was the lead suspect. McCoy's lawyer "pointed to an Arizona case in which a man was mistakenly arrested and jailed for murder largely based on Google data received from a geofence warrant. McCoy said he may have ended up in a similar spot if his parents hadn't given him several thousand dollars to hire Kenyon." "I didn't realize that by having location services on that Google was also keeping a log of where I was going," McCoy said. "I'm sure it's in their terms of service but I never read through those walls of text, and I don't think most people do either...." The article also notes a Google filing last year reporting that the requests from state and federal law enforcement authorities incrased by more than 1,500 percent from 2017 to 2018, and then again by 500 percent from 2018 to 2019.

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