A recent news article from Gainesville, Florida has brought additional scrutiny onto the practice of geofence warrants. Geofence warrants allow police departments to compel google to provide them with anonymized Google location data from anyone with a geographic radius within a a select window of time around the occurrence of a crime. If after reviewing the anonymized batch of data police chose to further investigate an unidentified google user, they can further request identifiable user data from google, at which point Google notifies the relevant user to the police inquiry that they will release the relevant information to the authorities in a week unless the user takes legal action. The Geofence warrants themselves, however, are done in secret and no notification is given to any users that their data is being provided to the police.
While this recent case in Gainesville was dropped after the subject of the warrant (Mr. McCoy) pursued legal action. However, other ongoing litigation surrounding geofence warrants has raised the question of their constitutionality in the US. While this litigation is ongoing, commentators have observed that dragnet nature of geofence warrants “inverts the normal expectations of warrant procurement. Instead of targeting an individual or place, the warrants allow cops to search Google’s data stores for information about anyone who wandered into a targeted area during a certain time period.”
Brief research indicates that these cases are for the time confined to the US, with the only geofence related matter in Canada appearing to pertain to broad tracking of GPS data from police officers’ vehicles, not citizens’ private data. However given the relative recency and swift uptake of this procedure (with Google reporting “a 1,500% increase in the number of geofence requests it received in 2018 compared to 2017; and [as of December 2019], the rate […] increased from over 500% from 2018 to 2019.”), along with the secrecy of the warrant, it seems feasible that this is an issue Canada is or will soon be grappling with.