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Colorado Supreme Court Upholds Keyword Search Warrant
- tzs 3y ago> The case is People v. Seymour, which involved a tragic home arson that killed several people. Police didn’t have a suspect, so they used a keyword warrant to ask Google for identifying information on anyone and everyone who searched for variations on the home’s street address in the two weeks prior to the arson. So the warrant required producing information about a small number of Google users. > Like geofence warrants, keyword warrants cast a dragnet that require a provider to search its entire reserve of user data—in this case, queries by one billion Google users. ...but they talk about the total number of people's records Google had to look at to find the small number that satisfied the warrant. I'm not sure why they are bringing that up. As far as I know that's never been relevant when it comes to the 4th amendment. It's the result set that matters, not how many records you had to look at to find that set which can vary greatly depending on just how how you happen to organize your records. E.g., suppose that two rental cars were involved in a crime, one from Hertz and one from Avis. Police know the license numbers of the cars and get warrants to find out who was renting the cars at the time of the crime. Let's also say this was in the days when the records would be paper records in filing cabinets. Let's say Hertz's files are sorted by year and customer name. To find out who had the Hertz car at the time of the crime someone has to just go through all the customer records for the current year looking for the one that had the car. Hertz then ends up looking at the records of about half of the people who rented cars from them so far this year in order to find the one person whose identity the warrant asks for. Let's say Avis's files are sorted by year and car. They just have to go to the current year's records, pull this years file for the car, and then look at the list of customers in that file to see which one had it at the time of the crime. Avis ends up looking at the records of just the people who have rented that one car so far this year to find the one person whose identity the warrant asks for. That's a much smaller number of people's records than Hertz has to look at. Those two warrants would be identical as far as the 4th Amendment goes, because what they are asking for, "who had this particular car at this particular time?", is reasonable. I don't see how it would be any different for records in an electronic database instead of a paper database. The constitutionality of a warrant is not going to turn on whether the query planner can use indexes or has to do a full table scan.
- clubm8 3y agoI want a list of them. Or at least, categories.
- gigel82 3y agoI just went looking for my Google Search history (https://myactivity.google.com/product/search https://myactivity.google.com/product/search) and it claims "Not saving" but I know for a fact searches I'm making on my mac auto-complete on my pc if I use the "Google" container in Firefox. It says the same "No activity" for YouTube but I can clearly go on YouTube watch history right now and see every video I've played. That's extremely fishy.
- metarmask 3y agoThe YouTube one could be if you have a old/brand account with a name that's different from your Google account. It should be available in the account switcher.
- tantalor 3y agoAre you sure you actually have it "turned off"? If I go to youtube activity controls and click "turn off" then my history stops being saved (checked by watching a video) then when I click "turn on" then the history starts working again.
- bippihippi1 3y agoread it again, it says that it stops being saved to your account.
- hedora 3y agoProbably time to switch search engines. Duck Duck Go results are as good as Google’s, and have been for a long time. Also, they don’t fill the first screen and a half with user-targeted spam and query-targeted structured data spam.
- lazycouchpotato 3y agoBrave [1] seems to have stepped up their game - at least in the search engine space, and I should get around to trying Kagi [2] as well. [1] https://search.brave.com/ https://search.brave.com/ [2] https://kagi.com/ https://kagi.com/
- Simulacra 3y agoColorado of all places… This is really a shocking ruling. Anything you put into a browser could be used against you now.
- ttyprintk 3y agoRelated: police purchased data from Fog Data Science: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32673075 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32673075
- 0xDEADFED5 3y agoThis is a very broad power to be granted so casually. Local cops (and people impersonating local cops) shouldn't be able to go fishing for evidence like this. Searching for abortion clinics could be the next thing targeted.
- dclowd9901 3y agoI can imagine google sending their lawyers after such a request. Not that it makes any of this better, but, at least the cynical take here (google covering their own ass so it doesn’t blow up in public) is enough to rely on.
- heavyset_go 3y agoTech companies like Google regularly just give police users' data when it's simply asked for. They all have portals that expedite this process. Some companies publish stats based on this. They get thousands of such requests a year, sometimes with warrants, and the vast majority are fulfilled without a fight.
- oxygen_crisis 3y agoGoogle's lawyers rejected the first two warrants issued for asking for too much information, it wasn't until after the prosecutors got on a call with Google lawyers for coaching on how to serve a more subtle warrant that they complied with the third.
- dclowd9901 3y ago_sigh_ nevermind. I guess I didn’t really dream up a scenario where somehow google lawyers would be motivated to comply with a service.
- tiahura 3y agoA house was burned down, and the cops wanted to know who searched for the house address prior to the arson. I’m having a hard time getting worked up about this. To me it’s the equivalent of getting a warrant to find out who bought matches. It’s not like the police got access to all of the users browsing history, they just got a list of IP address who had been casing the joint.
- zoklet-enjoyer 3y agoThis is fucking insane
- Borgz 3y agoApparently Google provided police with IP addresses, but not names [1]. Assuming that Google did not provide any other account details, the usage of a VPN service or Tor might be able to protect users in similar cases. [1] https://apnews.com/article/google-search-arson-suspects-colorado-4321aa7326bd96749f51b252d32ddf20 https://apnews.com/article/google-search-arson-suspects-colo...
- perihelions 3y agoOr just use a sensible search engine like Kagi, which doesn't associate search queries with users (it doesn't need to; it's not in the business of selling users to ad brokers). https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#why-trust https://help.kagi.com/kagi/faq/faq.html#why-trust It's weird how easily we've acclimatized to creepy tech-company spying. For Google to snoop on your searches, record them, and permanently archive them for retrieval years in the future was a very creepy and ignominious business model, and it's embarrassing how readily we all went along with it, for the convenience.
- radicaldreamer 3y agoOr something like iCloud Private Relay
- deeth_starr_v 3y agoI’m sure apple keeps logs so you can be looked up for law enforcement
- ARandomerDude 3y agoReason #637,973 to use Brave search or DDG.
- ldhough 3y agoI've been having a great time w/ Kagi, absolutely worth the $10/mo.
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- taeric 3y agoI'm not sure I buy the dragnet scare used on this. After a house is burned down, they are likely to ask everyone around if they saw or heard anything. Heck, they are likely to ask the library in town if anyone had checked out a book that outlined how to make a firebomb or similar. Ask local stores if they saw anyone buy fuel that could be used as an accelerant. Expectations are a no in all cases for questions like this, but they still ask. In this case, they asked, "any chance anyone has been looking at this particular address?" It would be one thing if they asked for general access to every search that had been done in town. But, wasn't this a case of asking if they searched on a specific address, and it turning up a silly low number of results? And then they were able to find other leads and data? Or is there a more sinister vibe that I'm just not seeing here?
- theptip 3y agoThey may ask, and you may plead the fifth, and I might decline to talk to the police on principle. Executing a general warrant compels everyone to “answer the question” in your analogy, which is clearly very different. You keep saying “ask” but here they seize.
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- taeric 3y agoThat doesn't really change much, though? For one, they couldn't compel you, even with a warrant, to testify against yourself. They can compel you to provide information against others, though. If we are against that entire concept, that is one thing. But that is not the argument here, is it?
- heavyset_go 3y agoYou can be compelled to provide evidence that incriminates you, but not testimony. It's the difference between "tell us if you committed this crime" and "we're going to comb through records of your past speech to see if you said anything suspicious and there's nothing you can do to stop us".
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]