Thurs. Jan. 13, 2022 | By Zack Whittaker – techcrunch |
A New York bill that would ban state law enforcement from obtaining residents’ private user data from tech giants through the use of controversial search warrants will get another chance, two years after it was first introduced.
The Reverse Location Search Prohibition Act was reintroduced to the New York Assembly and Senate last year by a group of Democratic lawmakers after the bill previously failed to pass. Last week, the bill was referred to committee, the first major hurdle before it can be considered for a floor vote.
The bill, if passed, would be the first state law in the U.S. to end the use of geofence warrants and keyword search warrants, which rely on asking technology companies to turn over data about users who were near the scene of a crime or searched for particular keywords at a specific point in time.
For geofence warrants — also known as “reverse location” warrants — law enforcement asks a judge to order Google, which collects and stores billions of location data points from its users’ phones and apps, to turn over records on whose phones were in a certain geographical radius at the time of a crime to help identify possible suspects. Geofence warrants are a uniquely Google problem; law enforcement knows to tap Google’s databases of location data, which the search giant uses to drive its ads business, last year netting the company close to $150 billion in revenue…
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