EFF Tells Minnesota Supreme Court to Strike Down Geofence Warrant As Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Takes the Wrong Turn

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We haven’t seen the end of invasive geofence warrants just yet, despite Google’s big announcement late last year that it was fundamentally changing how it collects location data. Today, EFF is filing an amicus brief in the Minnesota Supreme Court in State v. Contreras-Sanchez, involving a warrant that directed Google to turn over an entire month of location data in response to a geofence warrant. Our brief argues that warrant violates the Fourth Amendment and Minnesota’s state constitution.

Geofence warrants require a provider—almost always Google—to search its entire reserve of user location data to identify all users or devices located within a geographic area during a time period specified by law enforcement. This creates a high risk of turning suspicion on innocent people for crimes they didn’t commit and can reveal sensitive and private information about where individuals have traveled in the past. We’ve seen a recent flurry of court cases involving geofence warrants, and these courts’ rulings will set important Fourth Amendment precedent not just in geofence cases, but other investigations involving similar “reverse warrants” such as users’ keyword searches on search engines.

In Contreras-Sanchez, police discovered a dead body on the side of a rural roadway. They did not know when the body was disposed of and had few leads, so they sought a warrant directing Google to turn over location data for the area around the site for the previous month. Notably, Google responded that turning over the entire monthlong dataset would be too “cumbersome,” even though it covered only a relatively sparsely populated area. Instead, following the now-familiar “three-step” process for geofence warrants, Google provided police with location data corresponding to t

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