Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users
1–10 of 198 posts
Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users
#2From my perspective, this ability was generally assumed to be true but confirmation is interesting.
Heck, it’s even a running stand-up joke. “Ask your wife if you can look up something on her phone. Google “How to kill your husband” and hand it back to her. Congrats, you’re safe for another month!
Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users
#3In principle I don't have a problem with the police getting a warrant to find out who searched for a specific name or place in a constrained time frame. It's a bit like the police asking the library who checked out a specific book.
The problem is that this could obviously be used with keywords that target a wide group of people, e.g. finding everyone who plans to attend a protest. If we continue to allow keyword warrants we should add a law limiting their reach, e.g. by limiting the number of people who can be revealed in the answer to any one such warrant.
Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users
#4What I don't know, even though I was in the same building with the people who handled these orders in Google Legal, is:
If you clear your Google history (as you should), can they still respond to an order like this with your name? What if you did the search from Brave or Safari, where you were not logged into Google?
Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users
#5What I don't know, even though I was in the same building with the people who handled these orders in Google Legal, is: If you clear your Google history (as you should), can they still respond to an order like this with your name? What if you did the search from Brave or Safari, where you were not logged into Google?
> If you clear your Google history (as you should), can they still respond to an order like this with your name?
Assuming they still have the data (didn’t delete it, just “cleared” it), then yes.
Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users
#6What I don't know, even though I was in the same building with the people who handled these orders in Google Legal, is: If you clear your Google history (as you should), can they still respond to an order like this with your name? What if you did the search from Brave or Safari, where you were not logged into Google?
>If you clear your Google history
Also what if you are logged into Google, but your Google search history was always switched off?
>What if you did the search from Brave or Safari, where you were not logged into Google?
Relevant quote from the article:
>In Wisconsin, the government was hopeful Google could also provide “CookieIDs” belonging to any users who made the searches. These CookieIDs “are identifiers that are used to group together all searches conducted from a given machine, for a certain time period. Such information allows investigators to ascertain, even when the user is not logged into a Google account, whether the same individual may have conducted multiple pertinent searches,” the government wrote.
Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users
#7Don't want to be swept up in a dragnet? Don't want to be a suspect based on normal everyday activities? Then you better not use Google, try DuckDuckGo or another private search engine.
Edit: downvote all you want. dealing with google is like talking to the police, whatever you say/do will be used against you. in googles case for advertising/influencing you or by the government using the google gold mine. you can spare yourself by using a different search engine.
Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users
#8DuckDuckGo famously does not save your search history but the way things are going I fear that one day such a thing will be mandated.
Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users
#9What I don't know, even though I was in the same building with the people who handled these orders in Google Legal, is: If you clear your Google history (as you should), can they still respond to an order like this with your name? What if you did the search from Brave or Safari, where you were not logged into Google?
> If you clear your Google history (as you should), can they still respond to an order like this with your name?
They can still trace you via your IP Address. Ironically, Incognito is not really an incognito
Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users
#10Interesting to confirm that this has actually been done. I wonder if there's really any process around it.
It doesn't seem so bad to do it for something super-specific, like the home address of the victim of a crime, in the timeframe that the crime was committed, where you expect to get under 10 individuals. What's more worrying is how broad could this get? Are there any actual legal limits, or does Google just give the Government whatever they ask for?
It seems more and more like some of the tech majors are so big and so dominant over the industry and our lives that it makes less sense to treat them as private companies. In theory, under current legal dogma, Google is a private corporation, and I have no rights at all to data it gathers, so it can hand it over to the Government anytime it feels like it with no knowledge or due process. Even if they claim they only share information for the Right Cases, how do you know, how can you trust them? Do you have any recourse if you think your case was not justified?