“When the providers are telling you one thing, and the government is telling you another, then something’s broken and it needs to be fixed,” said Albert Gidari, who served as consulting director of privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society and recently retired. He has also represented Google as a lawyer in the past.
“Google is sitting on so much location data,” explained Stephen Smith. “That’s the gold mine of location information of all the providers. Phone companies have location data, but typically it’s not as precise as what Google has, and it’s not as extensive.”