An appellate court on July 9 upheld the government’s use of a geofence warrant to obtain users’ location data from Google in a 2019 Virginia bank robbery case, which led to a suspect being found and charged. The court noted it upheld the warrant based on different reasons than an earlier district court ruling.
A geofence warrant requires Google to produce location history data for all users within a specific geographic area during a particular time period, affecting only users who have opted into Google collecting and storing their location data.
