The Supreme Court case that could redefine your digital privacy : NPR
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Police in Virginia used a technique called geofencing to access Google databases to find out who was near the scene of a bank robbery in the town of Midlothian, where a robber pulled out a gun and then fled with $195,000.
Geofencing allows the government to draw a virtual fence around a geographic area where a crime has been committed. After that, the government asks for a warrant — not to search a home or office, but to demand that a tech company search its data to identify any of its millions of users who were within the geofence line at the time of the crime.
This technique is under legal scrutiny because of the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches of people, their homes, their papers, and their belongings, unless the police obtain a warrant from a neutral magistrate and unless the search is carried out. aims to obtain specific evidence of a crime.
The question before the U.S. Supreme Court is whether geofencing is ingenious, Orwellian, or both. And finally, is it constitutional?
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