Zachary McCoy was confused and concerned when Google’s legal investigations support team sent him an email informing him that local police in Gainesville, Florida, had requested data related to his Google account. The company said McCoy had seven days to legally block the request.
McCoy had been using an exercise-tracking app, RunKeeper, to record his rides and one of the homes on his bike route had been burglarized nearly a year earlier.
The email came out of the blue and rattled McCoy.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 68: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin talks about the recent backlash against Lebron James for not speaking up for Joshua Wong and the violent Hong Kong protestors.
Even though he knew he hadn’t done anything wrong, “I was hit with a really deep fear,” McCoy, 30, recalled.
His Android phone was linked to his Google account, and, like millions of other Americans, he used an assortment of Google products, including Gmail and YouTube. “Now, police seemingly wanted access to all of it,” NBC News reported.
“I didn’t know what it was about, but I knew the police wanted to get something from me,” McCoy said in a recent interview. “I was afraid I was going to get charged with something, I don’t know what.”
When McCoy searched the case number listed in the email on the Gainesville Police Department’s website he found a one-page investigation report on the burglary of an elderly woman’s home 10 months earlier. The crime had occurred less than a mile from the home that McCoy, who had recently earned an associate degree in computer programming, shared with two others, NBC News reported.
Instead of going straight to the police, McCoy asked his parents for help with a lawyer. They used their savings.
According to the lawyer, Caleb Kenyon, the police had used a “geofence warrant” — a surveillance tool that casts a virtual search over crime scenes, gathering Google location data picked up from users’ GPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and cellular connections. It picks up this information from everyone nearby.
“The warrants, which have increased dramatically in the past two years, can help police find potential suspects when they have no leads,” NBC News reported. “They also scoop up data from people who have nothing to do with the crime, often without their knowing ─ which Google itself has described as ‘a significant incursion on privacy.’”
McCoy’s exercise-tracking app was tied to his phone’s location services, which fed his movements to Google. His route on the day of the March 29, 2019 burglary passed in front of the victim’s house three times within an hour — part of the frequent loops he does in his neighborhood.
“It was a nightmare scenario,” McCoy recalled. “I was using an app to see how many miles I rode my bike and now it was putting me at the scene of the crime. And I was the lead suspect.”
Privacy and civil liberties advocates have been concerned that geofence warrants violate constitutional protections from unreasonable searches, NBC News reported. However, law enforcement authorities say those worries are overblown. They say police don’t obtain any identifying information about a Google user until they find a device that draws their suspicion. And the information alone is not enough to justify charging someone with a crime, they say.
Law enforcement agencies across the country, including the FBI, use Google geofence warrants. In a court filing last year, Google reported that requests from state and federal law enforcement authorities have increased by more than 1,500 percent from 2017 to 2018, and by 500 percent from 2018 to 2019.
McCoy and his attorney Kenyon ultimately convinced the police he was innocent.
Kenyon said he got on the phone with the detective on the case and told him, “You’re looking at the wrong guy.”
“I didn’t realize that by having location services on, that Google was also keeping a log of where I was going,” McCoy said. “I’m sure it’s in their terms of service but I never read through those walls of text, and I don’t think most people do either.”
