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Under court order, Google reveals users' search history 9,000 times a year
- rmg 16y agoOne of the reasons I like DuckDuckGo.
- ceejayoz 16y agoAssuming the government doesn't quietly get a court order forcing them to log and keep silent about it, of course.
- alexandros 16y agoIn that case, I'd be shocked if Gabriel continued to tout the fact that DDG keeps no logs. Surely a court order can't force him to keep doing that.
- epi0Bauqu 16y agoI can't see a situation where I could be forced to keep quiet about something like that. And then there is wikileaks or some equivalent. For the record though, I have yet to get a court order about anything.
- ceejayoz 16y agohttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Letter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Security_Letter > A National Security Letter (NSL) is a form of administrative subpoena used by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation and reportedly by other U.S. Government Agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense. It is a demand letter issued to a particular entity or organization to turn over various record and data pertaining to individuals. They require no probable cause or judicial oversight. They also contain a gag order, preventing the recipient of the letter from disclosing that the letter was ever issued. The gag order was later deemed unconstitutional, but that didn't stop them from issuing 200,000 of them.
- jambo 16y agoI like the "warrant canary" idea implemented by rsync.net, but I'm not sure if courts would see ceasing regular announcements as violating a gag order. http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt http://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/canary.txt
- maukdaddy 16y agoYou will eventually. Just wait until a kiddie porn ring is busted and forensics reveal DDG was used to located images. Unfortunately, this kind of situation will happen any time you run a service for the masses.
- tomjen3 16y agoThat is why you build your system in such a way that you physically _can't_ put a log in it.
- ceejayoz 16y agoAnd how would you do that? Good luck telling the FBI "oh, I can't change the code on my own system".
- ikujhygtfghyjuk 16y agoWell they managed to tell the governor of california that they couldn't change the code to give themselves a pay cut.
- grellas 16y agoAmerican law has never taken an absolutist view of privacy rights. For example, even lawyer confidentiality has exceptions, as for example when a client tells you he is going to commit a future crime (that is not regarded as privileged and can be disclosed by the attorney to the authorities). In the context of lawsuits and court orders, the key to protecting privacy is to abide by due process concerns. In other words, sometimes otherwise private information can become subject to discovery through legal processes such as third-party subpoenas. A holder of that information, such as Google, has no direct stake in the fight between the parties and will not disclose such information voluntarily. Nonetheless, court processes permit litigants to use lawful means to compel disclosure. Notice typically must be given to the adverse party, who in turn has a right to contest the litigant's right to obtain the information. A neutral judge will then consider whether the information ought to be protected when weighing the importance of disclosure in such a case against any rights of privacy that might be implicated (it is this process of notice, opportunity to contest, and neutral judicial evaluation that affords the due process protections). In most such cases, privacy rights do ultimately trump disclosure but not in all. Thus, when a court orders that disclosure be made, a litigant is forced to make it and, if a third party such as Google holds that information, it too is ordered to make it, though it has no stake in the fight. Since American law is not absolutist on the privacy issues, and since Google must comply with lawful court orders, I don't think it can be faulted for doing so. Also, given the likely huge number of times it finds itself in this position, I don't think there is anything untoward about a number such as "9,000 times a year." This is perhaps why Mr. Schmidt made his comment in such an off-handed way. This is just a routine part of doing business. I will grant there are policy arguments that could be made to the contrary but, legally, Google is on sound footing in its handling of privacy issues as described in the article.
- hugh3 16y agoAmerican law has never taken an absolutist view of privacy rights. Does any form of law take an absolutist view of privacy rights?
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- prosa 16y agoAm I the only one who was surprised at how low that number was?
- ikujhygtfghyjuk 16y agoThis is the number of request by agencies that bothered to get warrants. It doesn't include three-letter-agencies that have their own access.
- kenjackson 16y agoI actually thought it was pretty high. That's like 25 times per day Google is sending search information to law enforcement. One thing I do hope is that they are requiring a judge to sign off on these like wiretaps. I'd worry about a jealous husband in law enforcement trying to find out what his ex-gf is up to. What I find kind of surprising is I've heard of very few cases that have used this information. They certainly never use it on Law & Order.
- ErrantX 16y agoMost of these are likely civil warrants. And, yes, you would need a judge to sign off on these. Google (more than most companies) are particularly anal (and rightly so) about disclosures such as these.
- Gotttzsche 16y agoi was surprised they save my search history. :naive: is there even any legitimate use for that? any ways to prevent that without making googling less easy?
- brown9-2 16y agoPretty sure you can turn off your search history in your account settings.
- cosmicray 16y agogranted Google is the big fish in the search engine pond ... does this imply that a court order to Google also means that Yahoo, Bing, Altavista, et al, are also getting a similar court order for the same user ?
- pedanticfreak 16y agoConsidering Google gets 140+ million unique visitors, that's less than 0.0064% of all users? Color me unimpressed. Now if you told me personal information was being offered WITHOUT a court order, then I'd be more concerned.
- jeebusroxors 16y agoI think your math is off. The 140+ million unique visitors are world wide. Wouldn't these ~9,000 requests be coming from and directed to people in the US?
- Semiapies 16y agoWhy would that limitation exist? There are all sorts of reasons federal agencies would get court orders to look at international information held by a US company.
- tomjen3 16y agoWhat exactly are they going to do with their search history? Unless it involve kiddy porn or something like that?
- Encosia 16y agoIt's common to see news stories about dumb criminals who were targeted for more thorough investigation, leading to their eventual conviction, due to their Internet search history (e.g. "How much antifreeze does it take to kill an adult" and "how to mask the taste of antifreeze in food")
- jacquesm 16y agoI'm just going to have to google that now. I really hope that I won't have anybody die near me in the near future by drinking anti-freeze because I'll surely be in the docket defending myself.
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- ErrantX 16y agoThe slight fallacy in the article (and in general on this topic) is the thinking Google are especially unique in receiving these orders. The truth is any large service provider is getting as many, it's just the modern version of forced disclosure. A lot of the Google orders will be civil disclosure. That is mostly because in criminal cases there is more leeway for seizing the physical machines - which produces better results (from the perspective of court evidence). But when you get to the ISP level they will be dealing with all manner of criminal/civil requests for IP log data. Just some perspective (I won't comment my opinion on it)
- SageRaven 16y agoI'm curious if Google has a voluntary reporting system, such as the one outlined here: http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2010/06/state-action-and-4th-amendment.html http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2010/06/state-action-and-4th-.... AOL apparently uses the semi-secret child porn hash database to proactively scan content traversing its systems and reports to the authorities when they get a hit. I'm sure other large providers do this, and it wouldn't surprise me if Google was one of them.
- jacquesm 16y agoWe do this too. To the surprise of some child pornographers.
- julian37 16y ago"He added that Google "rewrites" your search history after a year and a half, so that it can no longer be tracked, even under a court mandate." My search history on http://google.com/history http://google.com/history goes back to January 2007, which is over three years. Maybe he meant that history entries older than one and a half years will be "rewritten" if you manually went and asked Google to remove them (by using the "Remove Items" function in the history). I wonder how many people are aware of that function.