That headline misses the big problem. It’s not that Google was forced to give up search history data. If Google gets a warrant, they will comply. The real problem is that the justices acknowledged that the warrant was unconstitutional and permitted the evidence anyway. They claim the police “acted in good faith” while violating the constitution, which is a horrifying precedent.
If you’re thinking “alls well that ends well,” because they caught the arsonists who murdered a family of five, I can sympathize with that feeling, but consider that the murderer may have his conviction overturned on subsequent appeals.
The police obtained a warrant for everyone who searched for a thing from Google, and the search information was used against the accused in court. 14 states currently outlaw abortion, and there’s some cousin-fucking conservative prosecutor in Dipshit, Alabama, just salivating over the prospect of obtaining the IP addresses of every person looking up directions to clinics.
I wonder how many companies like Cambridge analytica or TPUSA just have access to these. It wouldn’t surprise me if there’s some social engineering dark arts underground of pretending to be police and getting this data to study
This is in fact a thing
https://cyberhoot.com/blog/fake-emergency-search-warrants-becoming-a-problem/
Not long after Dobbs, someone posted a guide on r/WitchesVsPatriarchy on how to securely find* this information without opening yourself up to potential harm. Terrifying that that’s even a thing that needs to exist.
Lemmy needs a witches vs patriarchy- or is there one already? Im too lazy to check rn
Cool, I’m too lazy to answer!
Damn. Guess I’ll just have to live in ignorance. (Clearly there’s no other choice)
Here. I have lots of energy since the patriarchy can’t fuck me without being gay. Sadly it’s empty
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !witchesvspatriarchy@lemmy.ml
Subbed because… why not. Maybe we can make it a thing?
“Ahhh gosh oh golly I guess i better comply with this police warrant” says the company that actively engages in one of the largest tax fraud operations in human history.
Tax fraud? What am I missing?
Assuming they’re talking about what most businesses, especially large ones with huge legal resources, do: exploit loopholes to not pay, or pay reduced, taxes.
How is it fraud if they’re using loopholes?
I’m sure they mean fraud in the colloquial sense, not the legal sense.
From my personal lemmy experience, a lot of people would consider it actual (legal) fraud that’s just not being prosecuted because the perpetrator/s are wealthy.
the police acted in good faith, meaning the evidence will be allowed in court despite the warrant being legally flawed
I have no knowledge (or particular interest) in USA laws, but I guess that judges making this decision is a statement of future intent. I guess if you don’t want to be tracked then don’t use services which track you!
this just means the cops can do anything??
i mean shit i guess they can here anyway, but it’s stunning to see that written down. oh they thought they were doing the right thing? oh that’s fine then
Even worse, the court said what they did was wrong but they get to use the result anyway.
Over a decade ago they had devices called “sting ray” that act like antenna. It captures all text messages in the area.
In Colorado, until a new law overides the ruling, google must reveal your search history when subpoenaed. This doesn’t affect surrounding states or federal law until their own judges make a ruling or politicians make a law.
The issue here is not that they are required to reveal search history of suspects, the issue is that the police is browsing the search history of everyone in order to find a suspect. That’s not what warrants are for and violates the constitutional rights of nearly everyone they searched.
Opposite actually. The court decision says that all future reverse keyword search warrants in Colorado will have their evidence thrown out. This one, however, didn’t have precedent so the police acted in good faith.
Never ask Google a question you wouldn’t also ask the feds!
Never ask Google a question.
you wouldn’t also ask the feds!FTFY
I am conflicted on how I feel about that. Obviously information dragonets are bad because they’re specifically designed to produce false positives. In this case, however, they produced a definite positive that wouldn’t have been achieved otherwise.
Edit:
The good-faith exception to the exclusionary rule provides that “evidence
obtained in violation of the Fourth Amendment should not be suppressed in
circumstances where the evidence was obtained by officers acting in objectively
reasonable reliance on a warrant issued by a detached and neutral magistrate, even
if that warrant was later determined to be invalid.” Gutierrez, 222 P.3d at 941; see
also Leftwich, 869 P.2d at 1272 (holding that Colorado’s good-faith exception,
35
codified in section 16-3-308, C.R.S. (2023), is “substantially similar” to the Supreme
Court’s rule). The exception exists because there is little chance suppression will
deter police misconduct in cases where the police didn’t know their conduct was
illegal in the first place. Leon, 468 U.S. at 918–19. In such cases, “the social costs of
suppression would outweigh any possible deterrent effect.But the good-faith analysis in Gutierrez is distinguishable. True, we held
there that the good-faith exception did not apply, but we had already recognized
that individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in their financial records
when Gutierrez was decided. Id. at 933 (citing numerous cases and statutes
establishing that an individual’s financial records are protected under Colorado
law). So, the police were on notice that a nexus was required between a crime and
Gutierrez’s individual tax records. See id.38
¶70 By contrast, until today, no court had established that individuals have a
constitutionally protected privacy interest in their Google search history. Cf.
Commonwealth v. Kurtz, 294 A.3d 509, 522 (Pa. Super. Ct. 2023) (holding that, under
the third-party doctrine, the defendant did not have a reasonable expectation of
privacy in his search history). In the absence of precedent explicitly establishing
that an individual’s Google search history is constitutionally protected, DPD had
no reason to know that it might have needed to demonstrate a connection between
the alleged crime and Seymour’s individual Google account.In essence, the court is saying that this is the one and only time this will be allowed in Colorado.
https://www.courts.state.co.us/userfiles/file/Court_Probation/Supreme_Court/Opinions/2023/23SA12.pdf
The obvious potential harm in general outweighs the positive outcome in a specific case. Justifying broad surveillance because it works occasionally is the road to a police state.
Thus why it’s prohibited in the future.
The entire exeption, and the broader exclusionary rule, is based around the self-evidently incorrect assumption that what happens in court will effect behaviour of investigators.
search warrant that required Google to provide the IP addresses of anyone who had searched for the address of a home within the previous 15 days of it being set on fire
I’m fine with this. It’s specific to an actual crime that happened, and not targeting a known individual or preventing something that hasn’t happened yet, “for the children” or some nonsense like that.
It wasn’t specific to an individual criminal, though. Police aren’t allowed to get warrants for fishing expeditions, they’re supposed to find leads themselves and then get a concise warrant to evidence to confirm that. They searched people they had no right to search, and violated their constitutional rights.
It wasn’t specific to the fire? Like, whoever googled the address is a suspect. That’s a pretty good way to solve a crime.
Would you still feel the same way if the DMV was set on fire and you were a suspect because you’d searched for directions to the place?
Or if you had searched that home address because you were looking for homes in the area to compare with what you wanted?
It shouldn’t be enough to make a Google search to assume an individual is a suspect in a crime.
Yes exactly. This story has echos of the guy who was hounded by police (and maybe even charged and convicted?) because he took a different route while cycling and rode past a house where a crime was committed. That, too, was Google.
You’re fine with not targeting an individual and using blanket warrants instead? Even a judge said it was unconstitutional due to it not being individualized, and the EFF says it can implicate innocents. Even Google, who tracks and collects most everything, was reluctant to hand it over.
Sure, this reinvigorated the case, but it has an “ends justify the means” feel to it, which is a slippery slope. But you’re actively endorsing a less privacy friendly stance than Google, of all things. That blows my mind.
Everything must blow your mind. This is like going to a hotel and asking to see a list of people who stayed in the hotel last week because the suspect is probably staying nearby. Sounds like a pretty good way to get leads without asking for too much info.
Figuring out who searched for the address where the crime happened actually just sounds like good police work
Everything must blow your mind.
Just people in a privacy community advocating for even less privacy than Google, who is decidedly anti-privacy, wants. The company who detests privacy and wants to collect data on everyone said, “this might be private and we shouldn’t go with it,” and you go “nope, it’s not, give it over?” I feel like Google is a very low bar to pass for privacy, and you still tripped on it.
So yes, no matter how much I experience in the world, people advocating for being taken advantage of or having their rights violated (which is what’s happening here) blows my mind, despite running into it semi-constantly.
This is like going to a hotel and asking to see a list of people who stayed in the hotel last week because the suspect is probably staying nearby.
And the hotel can deny to provide this information if it is an informal request. Only with a warrant will they forced to give up that list and a judge issuing the order will want some proof as why the police believe the suspect stayed in the hotel.
I am not a lawyer so I could be wrong about the criteria for the issue of warrants.
Right. Google could have just looked that shit up voluntarily. I mean, it can’t be a long list.
But Google didn’t. They were forced by a warrant which was issued on grounds so weak, that judges themselves agreed that it was unconstitutional.
There was a fire and maybe people who looked up that address could be further investigated.
Do you think that’s weak grounds? How could that specific and very small list of IP addresses violate a persons privacy?
I obviously haven’t read the warrant request, and it could have been worded pretty poorly.
Yes I think that’s weak grounds. And so does the judge who presided over the case as well as several other judges who deemed the warrant as unconstitutional. The only reason the evidence was allowed was because the judge declared that the justice system broke the rules in good faith. I haven’t read the warrant request either just forming my opinion from articles on the issue.
I think that the warrant was issued on weak grounds because what the cops had was a hunch (a calculated one but still a hunch). They had no proof that the perpetrators/murderers searched for the apartment. It is not like they identified that searches for that addressed spiked at some point and served a warrant for those ip addresses during that spike. They just asked for all ip addresses in the last 15 days and that was because they did not have evidence pointing towards a search just a calculated hunch.
Edit : This precedent will have a lot of avenues for misuse. In States were abortion is banned, police can request warrants for abortion searches without the warrant specifying who specifically they are searching for and then investigate women whose ip addresses show up on the list. These will be woman whom the cops had zero evidence against, women who were not even suspects before an unconstitutional warrant like this makes them one.
Yeah, it’s a specific enough request that I don’t see any problem here.
Although, why the IP address? I would imagine most people using Google products would be logged into Google accounts. They’d probably know the exact account who made the search, rather than a vague IP that could belong to multiple people in.
Well, sometimes I google but I don’t have an account. And if I did, it wouldn’t have my real info.
Fair enough. I don’t think it’s common for someone to be doing Google searches without having an account linked to other services, though.
Anyone using YouTube, Gmail, etc. would be logged in.
And everyone with an android phone who uses google search would very likely be linked to an account, for example.
I just thought it would cut to the chase for Google to provide account holder info and not just IP addresses.
Then again, the arsonists could have very well used any of the other search engines to look up the address. So… maybe police aren’t aware that other search options exist.
It’s a shot in the dark for sure, but if it did have a hit, that’s probably the arsonist.
Forced? Not at all. Google happily complied.
Stop using Google products, people. There are alternatives for every service they offer. They haven’t invented anything new in over a decade
Is there a good alternative, maybe locally hosted, for location history?
While I’ve recently disabled it for Google, it actually was helpful for going back in time and remembering where I was on X day, on numerous occasions. Would be cool if there was a locally hosted, open source alternative.
If we aren’t committing any crimes, why should we care?
“If you’ve got nothing to hide, you’ve got nothing to fear.”
if you’re not doing any weird shit at home, why have blinds in your windows?
Another reason to use VPN/Tor.
Google also hands over location data to police
I always use Google anonymously as I always find alternative search engines to be lacking. Even without personalized search results, Google always works better for me.
Not even true anymore…
But if SEO trash is good enough for you, that is a nice cope
On the plus side, I meet less people like you when using their service, so it’s worth it to me.
Why is u hurt tho?
I’ve been using duck duck go for a while, and I’ve got a fresh Linux install on another machine I’m using as a server and I went to look something up. I was 2 pages in, thinking “ddg isn’t great, but this is ridiculous”, and I remembered i was on Google
Google has seriously fallen off lately
