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Comment by mulmen | Hacker News Reader

This seems a bit different though, the police are asking Google for a list of people who searched for a specific term, they aren't asking for the entire search history of those people. In that way I think the potential for revealing personal secrets is much more limited than it appears in the headline.

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In this case it seems entirely reasonable as you say.

However. Let me straw man a bit here.

In the case of, say, someone being murdered with "a 16 inch double ender" at a themed orgy... Well, let's just ask google for anyone who has searched for an appropriately inclusive set of terms in the past 3 months. It's logical that someone who gets flagged in this data set could be the culprit right?

Gosh I sure hope none of the data gets leaked or misused in any way by the fine upstanding people who get access to it.

Isn't this why judges look at search warrants? It seems like a judge concerned with privacy would look at the warrant to decide if it was reasonably minimal - to find the murderer without making too much collateral damage.

It's a case of balancing two rights - the right to privacy, and the right to life, to not be murdered. An absolutist stance on one would damage the other, and so we give judges the power to make decisions.

The whole point of having judges is to have upstanding and reasonable people we trust for this purpose, so we don't have to explicitly deliberate about every edge case before it happens.

That's not a logical assumption. Three months is a long time and you have applied no geographic limitation. Sure, if the situation was different it would be ...different. That's not much of an argument though. Also, you would really only be identifying orgy attendees.

And yeah, I don't trust the police with my data but I am reassured by the limited time and geography in their request.

Oh man you just reminded me of the Will Arnett skit from Human Giant. The one where Aziz Ansari "disguises" himself as Mary Kate Olsen to sneak into a party.

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