While the rest of the country has focused on the controversy surrounding Cambridge Analytica’s access to personal information about Facebook users, a controversy over police access to personal information about Google users has emerged closer to home. Last week, WRAL reported that:

In at least four investigations last year … Raleigh police used search warrants to demand Google accounts not of specific suspects, but from any mobile devices that veered too close to the scene of a crime…. These warrants often prevent the technology giant … from disclosing information about the searches not just to potential suspects, but to any users swept up in the search.

City and county officials say the practice is a natural evolution of criminal investigative techniques. They point out that, by seeking search warrants, they’re carefully balancing civil rights with public safety.

Defense attorneys and privacy advocates, both locally and nationally, aren’t so sure.

They’re mixed on how law enforcement turns to Google’s massive cache of user data, especially without a clear target in mind. And they’re concerned about the potential to snag innocent users, many of whom might not know just how closely the company tracks their every move.

“We are willingly sharing an awful lot of our lives with Google,” said Jonathan Jones, a former Durham prosecutor who directs the North Carolina Open Government Coalition at Elon University. “But do people understand that in sharing that information with Google, they’re also potentially sharing it with law enforcement?”

Most modern phones, tablets and laptops have built-in location tracking that pings some combination of GPS, Wi-Fi and mobile networks to determine the device’s position. …

This data is immensely valuable to Google, one of the reasons the company collects and stores the information on users of both its Android operating system and, in some cases, mobile apps such as Gmail. …

“We certainly, for a number of years, have seen cell phone data specific to an individual that might be used in a case to try to build part of a story,” Wake County District Attorney Lorrin Freeman said. “It’s one piece in a larger story and one investigative tool of many.” …

At least 19 search warrants issued by law enforcement in Wake County since 2015 targeted specific Google accounts of known suspects, court documents show.

But the March search warrants in … two [recent] homicide cases are after something different.

The demands Raleigh police issued for Google data described a [specific] area that included both homes and businesses. …

The account IDs aren’t limited to electronics running Android. The warrant includes any device running location-enabled Google apps, according to Raleigh Police Department spokeswoman Laura Hourigan. …

After five years as a Wake County prosecutor, Raleigh defense attorney Steven Saad said he’s familiar with police demands for Google account data or cell tower records on a named suspect. But these area-based search warrants were new to him.

“This is almost the opposite technique, where they get a search warrant in the hopes of finding somebody later to follow or investigate,” Saad said. “It’s really hard to say that complies with most of the search warrant or probable cause rules that we’ve got around the country.” …

Jones, the Elon professor and former Durham prosecutor, expressed similar concerns….

“In [some] cases, the evidence provided to establish probable cause seems very thin to me,” Jones said. “These amount to fishing expeditions that could potentially snare anyone in the vicinity with a cell phone, whether they were involved in the crime or not.”

To Stephanie Lacambra, criminal defense staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, all of the search warrants she reviewed are “deficient.”

“I don’t think with real scrutiny that they would hold up,” Lacambra said. …

“To just say, ‘Criminals commit crimes, and we know that most people have cell phones,’ that should not be enough to get the geo-location on anyone that happened to be in the vicinity of a particular incident during a particular time,” Lacambra said. …

Hourigan did not respond to questions about criticism of the warrants. But Freeman said that, based on her review of case law, she was confident the warrants would stand up to legal challenges.

“I think there are steps being put in place to try to protect people’s Fourth Amendment rights while still allowing law enforcement access to information that is very helpful during the course of the investigation,” Freeman said. …

North Carolina officials disagree with Google’s position that search warrants are necessary to demand the account data. But law enforcement are seeking the warrants anyway. …

The search warrants indicate that not all of the requests have resulted in the seizure of data. …

“We have a long-established process that determines how law enforcement may request data about our users,” [Google spokesman Aaron] Stein said in a statement. “We carefully review each request and always push back when they are overly broad.” 

Google’s most recent transparency report shows that there were about 5,200 search warrants requesting user information in the U.S. in the first half of 2017, an all-time high. User information requested through subpoenas and other court orders accounted for more than twice that number. The company produced at least some data in response to requests in the first of half of 2017 about 81 percent of the time.