How did the police know you were near a crime scene? Google told them https://www.mprnews.org/story/2019/02/07/google-location-police-search-warra... The suspects in an Eden Prairie home invasion last October wore gloves, dressed in black, and covered their faces with masks. But despite their efforts to remain unseen, a trail of evidence was left behind — not at the crime scene, but with Google. Knowing the Silicon Valley giant held a trove of consumer mobile phone location data, investigators got a Hennepin County judge to sign a "reverse location" search warrant ordering Google to identify the locations of cellphones that had been near the crime scene in Eden Prairie, and near two food markets the victims owned in Minneapolis and St. Paul. The scope of the warrant was so expansive in time and geography that it had the potential to gather data on tens of thousands of Minnesotans. The technique has caught the attention of civil liberties lawyers who worry such warrants — deployed increasingly by police in the Twin Cities and around the country — are a digital dragnet ripe for abuse, and that judges may not realize the technical details or broad scope of the searches they're authorizing. [...] The Eden Prairie detectives knew what most Google users should: that in exchange for the use of Google's devices and free services, users agree to let Google look over their shoulders. "[A] high percentage of the population regularly carries and uses a cellular phone," wrote a detective in one of these search warrant applications. "Google monitors its customers' activities and location through its free apps and services in order to provide more timely responses to queries and for targeted advertising ... [t]he services may be actively in use or running in the background on the device without the user's knowledge." Google's lengthy user agreement does specify that any data Google keeps may be provided to police in response to a legal demand. But the process by which a user consents to the data collection isn't always clear. "Google is sitting on an incredible amount of highly sensitive location data about millions and millions of people," said the ACLU's Wessler. "Some of that location data people may understand they're sharing with Google. And other parts of it, people almost certainly do not." [..] wo hard-to-find settings (se siete utenti Google: https://myaccount.google.com/activitycontrols?pli=1 ) — "Location History" and "Web and App Activity" — allow Google to keep track of everything their users search, and everywhere they go. It affects all Android users, and iPhone or iPad users with apps like Google Maps installed on their device. [...] Giacomo