Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

forbes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 198 posts

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#61

Post by jjoonathan »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #21
randombits0 wrote: post #2

From 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!

Yeah, honestly, this kind of thing slightly terrifies me. I know I have definitely Googled for totally random things that, when taken out of context, would look pretty bad. I remember once watching a show where someone was knocked out with chloroform, and I googled something like "Does chloroform really work?" or "Can you really knock someone out with chloroform?" I turned to my partner and joked "You better not be h…

Further, if someone were to train a machine learning model to predict which people googling "chloroform" actually went on to become kidnappers, you might find yourself at the front of the list -- not for a good reason, but because the term "MAC" is shared between tech and anesthesia, so some innocent fishing around for the OUI prefix on a smart fridge might be misinterpreted by a black box algorithm as the logistics of a kidnapper trying to determine the Minimum Alveolar Concentration of anesthetic required to accomplish their goals.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#62

Post by rank0 »

pugworthy wrote: post #54
goalieca wrote: post #8

DuckDuckGo famously does not save your search history but the way things are going I fear that one day such a thing will be mandated.

And ProtonMail never keeps (er, kept) IP logs. You can trust them if you want, but really can you trust any company now days?

They were legally compelled to BEGIN keeping logs for a specific individual. It’s not that they had logs ready to go. They also notified the user that they had received the Swiss warrant.

What should they have done differently? It’s comply with the order or dissolve the company.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#63

Post by burnished »

rstat1 wrote: post #51
vineyardmike wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You say that as if DuckDuckGo is completely immune to the same sorts of warrants. If you don't collect data, you can't share it in a warrant.

But they do though. How else are they going to serve you ads based on your search terms? (which they plainly say on their website that they do) There isn't a single search engine anywhere that isn't collecting some data. Not even DDG.

Serving ads based on your search terms is like serving an ad because some ones search had the word 'bolts' in it. You don't need to keep a lot of information pertaining to that around, not about the people using your service at least.

Google isn't doing that. They have pretty complete portraits of your life (and dare I say) psychology that only comes from having such an incredible wealth of information about you and your position in the network graph.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#64

Post by kube-system »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #58
jefftk wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ProtonMail was required to do this, under Swiss law. They don't track you by default, but they can be compelled to add logging by their government. This isn't an issue with ProtonMail in particular; any email provider has to follow local laws, and Swiss law is generally a pretty good framework if you have to choose.

For the record, I have no issue with Protonmail (or other tech companies) following the law. But their claim was always that email was encrypted and they "don't track you" which was always nonsense. Just like Apple's privacy promises. In the end all tech companies either track you, have the ability to track you, and have to give you up to the relevant authorities.

I think there's a significant and important difference between collecting data after being presented with a warrant, and collecting data indiscriminately by default.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#65

Post by ziddoap »

shadowgovt wrote: post #48
mdoms wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have any evidence that the same government orders were not given to DuckDuckGo? Or that they wouldn't be if DDG had any kind of meaningful market share?

If your goal is not to be seen, relying on things without meaningful market share is actually fine. Security through obscurity is bad long-term, comprehensive strategy because it's unstable and not indefatigable... Not because it doesn't work in the short run and in one-off cases.

>If your goal is not to be seen, relying on things without meaningful market share is actually fine.

Except for the cases where you want the exact opposite, because the noise makes it more difficult to find a single person. If there's only 5 people using, say, TOR Browser - you become easy to track.

Not saying this is the case here, just that different situations require different operational security considerations.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#66

Post by ziddoap »

Mikeb85 wrote: post #58
jefftk wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ProtonMail was required to do this, under Swiss law. They don't track you by default, but they can be compelled to add logging by their government. This isn't an issue with ProtonMail in particular; any email provider has to follow local laws, and Swiss law is generally a pretty good framework if you have to choose.

For the record, I have no issue with Protonmail (or other tech companies) following the law. But their claim was always that email was encrypted and they "don't track you" which was always nonsense. Just like Apple's privacy promises. In the end all tech companies either track you, have the ability to track you, and have to give you up to the relevant authorities.

>For the record, I have no issue with Protonmail

If this was the case, you would have given the full context in your earlier comment. There is a significant difference between tracking by default and tracking only when issued a court order.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#67

Post by ziddoap »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #15

Argh. Clickbait article header. The header sounds like a "blanket trawl," which, I suspect, would require an NSA-grade computer to manage (which they have, so it's not beyond belief). They were sending warrants to people that searched for particular names, addresses, etc. Not news. We all know this has been going on for many years. It's fairly standard, in many "capital crime" cases.

>Not news. We all know this has been going on for many years.

Who is the 'we' here?

Many people may have assumed this is happening... But according to the article itself, there's less then a handful of these specific warrants being recorded/unsealed/reported in the news.

Do you have access to sources which Forbes does not where more of these warrants are documented?

From the article:

>Before this latest case, only two keyword warrants had been made public. One revealed in 2020 [...]

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#68

Post by mywittyname »

wongarsu wrote: post #3

In 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 warr…

Most people do not have unique names. The number of unique names in the USA is estimated to be around 750,000 (using census data). Out of a population of 330,000,000 people. Which means, on average, 440 people will have the same name.

And these names will be clustered in population centers because people cluster in population centers. And since surnames are generally familial, people with the same names are very likely to live near other people with the same name.

You can use public records searches to find people nearby with the same name as you. You might be surprised at how common it is to have people near you with the same name. There are a few people locally who share a name with me, and who own businesses that probably get a decent amount of internet traffic based on name searches.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#69

Post by annoyingnoob »

stickfigure wrote: post #39
annoyingnoob wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You only posted a piece of my edit. I did also clarify my point. Was not meant as a complaint as much as a clarification and invitation for discussion. Wish more down votes would comment. My style tends to be terse/short and perhaps I don't always make my point well.

It still detracts from the conversation and invites distracting meta-threads like this one (and yes, I'm contributing). It's really better to let your original point stand on its own. Don't be disheartened by a few downvotes in the short period while a comment is still editable. You may get many more upvotes as time goes on. Or not, but don't take it personally either way. There are also people like me that upvote in…

Fair enough.

Re: Google keyword warrants give U.S. government data on search users

#70

Post by etc-hosts »

stickfigure wrote: post #57
icarus_gh wrote: post #38

As a person neither leaning East nor West who is an avid HN reader it's always interesting to read the comments under such topics where the collusion between US private companies come up. Comparing it to the reactions when tenous connections between Chinese companies and the CCP are characterised as a threat to freedom and human rights. It reminds me to be wary of my own biases. Because from where I stand they are al…

Courts in the US are generally quite independent of the political process. Abuse of the court system is prosecuted fairly heavily. This is "rule of law". On the other hand, courts in China do whatever the CCP tells them. These are not equivalent.

How do you feel about Steven Donziger ?

https://www.reuters.com/world/us/lawyer-who-sued-chevron-sen...

Post reply on HN