Activists demand Google open up about user data shared with police

Law enforcement shouldn't be the only outside group peering inside Google.

A coalition of 59 civil rights, labor, and civil society organizations sent an open letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai Tuesday, demanding the company be more transparent when it comes to how often it complies with law enforcement requests for user data. What's more, the letter signatories — which include the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, and the Brennan Center for Justice — want Google's help in resisting what they see as the "alarming growth" in searches carried out by law enforcement.

From where you've been to what you search, Google knows a lot about you. Increasingly, so does law enforcement. Of particular concern in Tuesday's letter, sent via USPS and email, are so called geofence warrants and keyword warrants.

"These blanket warrants circumvent constitutional checks on police surveillance, creating a virtual dragnet of our religious practices, political affiliations, sexual orientation, and more," reads the letter in part.

Geofence warrants involve police asking a company with location data on its users, like, say, Google, who (if anyone) was in a specific area at a specific time. This practice was in the news in 2019, when it was revealed that authorities had relied, in part, on geofence warrants in the effort to identify an alleged serial bomber in Austin, Texas. As the New York Timesreported at the time, authorities requested that location data from Google.

Keyword warrants, on the other hand, are troublingly invasive in an altogether different way. They involve law enforcement requesting data on every individual who searched for a specific phrase or location.

Both types of warrants are on the rise. An October CNET article cited in Tuesday's letter reports that "Google received 15 times more geofence warrant requests in 2018 compared with 2017, and five times more in 2019 than 2018."

"As a leading recipient of geofence and keyword warrants, Google is uniquely situated to provide public oversight of these abusive practices," reads the letter. "We ask you to do just that by expanding your industry-leading transparency report to provide monthly data on the number of non-traditional court orders received, including granular information on geofence warrants, keyword warrants, and any analogous requests."

In 2019, the New York Timesreported on a collection of Google user location data dubbed Sensorvault — "a trove of detailed location records involving at least hundreds of millions of devices worldwide." People who use Google services with Location History turned on, reported the Times, had their data stored by Google.

Google would then, in some circumstances, make that location data available to law enforcement.

That this practice, which takes place out of site of the average Google user, appears to be on the rise is part of what drives the new request.

How Google will respond is anyone's guess, but one thing is clear: Geofence and keyword warrants are here to stay. That is, unless privacy and civil rights activists can do anything about it.

"By providing this semiannual breakdown of requests, tracking the growth of these abusive tactics over time, [Google will] provide us and other civil society organizations vital ammunition in the fight for privacy," concludes the letter.

Fingers crossed Pichai reads it.

The full list of signatories is below.

• S.T.O.P. - The Surveillance Technology Oversight ProjectAccess Now

• Advocacy for Principled Action in Government

• Alternate ROOTS

• Amnesty International - USA

• Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF)

• Asian Americans Advancing Justice - Asian Law Caucus

• Brennan Center for Justice

• Brooklyn Defender Services

• CAIR-Minnesota

• California LGBT Arts Alliance

• Center for Human Rights and Privacy

• Center on Race, Inequality, and the Law at NYU Law

• Community Alliance for Global Justice Council on American-Islamic Relations, New York (CAIR-NY)

• Cypurr Collective

• Defending Rights & Dissent

• Demand Progress

• Due Process Institute

• Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) Emonyo Yefwe International

• Empire State Indivisible

• Encode Justice

• Equal Justice Under Law

• Ethics in Technology a 501 c 3

• Fight for the Future

• Freedom of the Press Foundation FreedomWorks

• Government Accountability Project Hacking//Hustling

• Islamophobia Studies Center

• Legal Action Center

• Media Alliance

• National Coalition Against Censorship

• New America's Open Technology Institute New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) New York

• County Defender Services Nicaragua Center for Community Action Northern New Jersey Jewish

• Voice for Peace Oakland Privacy

• Occupy Bergen County (N.J.)

• OCF @ U.C. Berkeley

• PDX Privacy

• Policing and Social Justice Project

• Project South

• Restore The Fourth

• Reviving the Islamic Sisterhood for Empowerment (RISE)

• TechActivist.Org

• Technology for Liberty Program, ACLU of Massachusetts

• Tenth Amendment Center

• The Bronx Defenders

• The Calyx Institute

• The Legal Aid Society of NYC

• The Project On Government Oversight TKE

• United Voices of Cortland

• Urban Justice Center

• Visionary V

• Wolfson Cybersecurity Club

• X-Lab