A couple months ago, we wrote about Julian Sanchez’s realization (due to odd choices in gov’t agencies redacting already publicly available info) that it appeared the government was likely regularly getting location info from mobile phone providers on users, using a much lower standard, without much oversight. In a somewhat related case, a court is now trying to determine if the location info on your mobile phone requires a warrant. The federal government is saying, no, claiming that Americans have no expectation of privacy as to where their phone is (even though that’s likely where they are as well).
That seems like a very troubling bit of reasoning — but no surprise from a federal government, that for years, has been stretching its ability to secretly spy on Americans. Hopefully the court shuts this down, but just the fact that the government would defend such a blatant overreach is troubling enough.
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