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Comment by stagbeetle | Hacker News Reader

If I understood the article correctly, the title is misleading.

The cops were not granted an entire raw database of all google searches by person. Instead, they were granted "'any/all user or subscriber information' of anyone in Edina who'd looked up that name between December 1, 2016, and January 7" which is IMHO a much less serious breach of privacy.

You could retort that collecting these users' "name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), dates of birth, social security numbers, email addresses, payment information, account information, IP addresses, and MAC addresses" is a serious breach of privacy, but I believe those are all available to law enforcement (save the internet-specific info).

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You are quite right, and it's a shame people are downmodding you.

For some reason there is this belief that anything you do electronically should be immune to warrants, and warrants should only apply to physical documents.

Just read the comments and see, it's really astonishing.

It was the same thing with that phone the FBI was hacking, [some] people had a deep-seated belief that because it was encrypted the FBI should not be permitted to hack it!

(Some people had other issues with it, but they were a minority - most simply felt the FBI should not be allowed to try to hack a phone.)

If a bike was stolen from a street, the police do not have the right to enter and search every home on that street to see if you committed the crime. We already have the legal framework for these kinds of questions in meatspace. The courts are treating it differently because its on a computer, the same way companies are getting patents for unpatentable processes as long as they do it on the internet

Except that's a terrible analogy. A better analogy is the police are asking all the landlords to check their security cameras for someone carrying a bicycle.

That is still really quite bad though. And all of this privacy invasion just for a wire fraud case?

> And all of this privacy invasion

Can you clarify what you mean by "all this"? Because as far as I can tell all they are asking for is the identity of the person who searched for a specific word.

That's hardly an invasion of privacy.

Failed wire fraud.

Yeah, they are doing this for a loss of... $0.

Principle is more important than money.

Google uses this stuff to advertise for toys etc. Using it to catch a fraudster is more important than that.

Unless you are prosecuted by accident, news papers write about you and charges are dropped. You apply for a job, someone googles you and reply with "Thank you for your time. Unfortunately..."

I don't think we can assume more information increases the likelihood of false accusations. It certainly can for any given situation, but it can certainly greatly reduce the risk by identifying the real perpetrator.

If I were on trial when I was innocent, I'd really appreciate having this information available.

Though if there was empirical data to suggest that it was more risky, I could be convinced.

Do the ends really justify the means in this case? I don't think so, personally

Sure they do. Especially when compared to what is accessible to civil plaintiffs.

Your searches aren't even private since you let google look at them.

google uses it for advertising but doesn't hand it over to any one particular person or company.

Google didn't murder a hundred million of its own users in the last century alone. It took police and government forces to do that.

Well if the government did murder 100 million people it would certainly use Google to assist.

Nazi's used IBM, VW, Bayer, etc.

Letting them get search data about fraud won't make that any more or less likely though.

The few people who searched for douglas would be inconvenienced slightly, sure.

But what harm has been, or might reliably, be done with this info?

Because innocent people getting swept up by the legal system is potentially disastrous for those people, particularly if they are people of color. Take the Kalief Browder case as an example: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law

Yes, this is one case.

However, injustices happen all over the world in varying degrees. It's important to figure out the balance of damage done / good done. If one out of 100 million people is wrongly convicted each year due to these practices, but 1 out of 50 million is rightly convicted each year, then this tool net good (even though innocent people have convicted.) This is just a simple view though, it's up to society to balance this equation (but that means not having a puritist and irrationally stubborn point).

What is the prevalence of accidental conviction due to the police having access to your limited private information?

Apart from gigantig societal issues around chilling effects and free speech related issues. Whenever you cast a wide net you must either do significant statistical modelling or disqualify the actual results of the warrant from being considered as evidence. Ie you can not both use the results to filter the suspects _and_ use it as evidence without knowing exactly what you are doing from a statistical point of view. As badly understood statistics generally are, the required level of rigor is unlikely to be achieved.

I understand where you're coming from.

But I believe this is just like where LE collects a list of suspects (from people the victim knew) and narrows down from there.

The net isn't as wide, nor is it used as the main evidence for conviction (atleast I would hope so).

For real?

It's not about this case, it's about the precedent.

The fight is about privacy...at all...online. Google needs to fight this for everyone because if they lose we all lose.

It sets an interesting precedent for more broad fishing expeditions. Slippery slope and that sort of thing. Have you watched the film Minority Report?

Have you? The concept was "pre-crime" which is stopping crimes before they happened - not investigating crimes that have already conclusively been committed. Additionally, upon finding the system in use was faulty it was dismantled and everyone affected by it given a pardon.

Not saying the slippery slope argument is invalid, but the use of Minority Report is better kept to arguments where the intent is to use "big data" to predict and prevent crimes - not for when crimes have been committed and the intent is to figure out who did it.

I mentioned it because it is the bottom of the slippery slope.

Once search data is open game for any law enforcement purpose, why not preemptively tag searches that are common before a crime takes place?

That said, I'm a bit confused as to how a "happy ending" would invalidate moral concerns raised by an illustrative story.

Also FWIW, leading with "Have you?" reduces the chance I might read what you had to say with an open mind.

No, but I get the general premise.

I don't see how it directly meshes into the issue at hand though.

Sweeping through large swaths of data on what people do in order to single out one potential person in the data.

Once you're good with that, it leads places.

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