Occasionally it’s hard to inform the corporate surveillance operations from the federal government ones:
Google reportedly includes a data source called Sensorvault where it stores location information for an incredible number of devices heading back almost ten years.
The article is approximately geofence warrants, where in fact the police head to companies like Search engines and ask for information regarding every device within a specific geographic area from a particular period. In 2013, we discovered from Edward Snowden that the NSA does this globally. Its program is named CO-TRAVELLER. The NSA promises it stopped doing that within 2014 — probably just halted doing it in america — but why should it bother once the government can simply obtain the data from Google.
Both the New York Times and EFF have discussed Sensorvault.
