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Comment by oldgregg | Hacker News Reader

Could a company create a warrant canary for every user? Just a simple notice when you login to your account? If the premise of the canary is that they can force you to keep silent but can't compel you to speak, what would prevent a company from doing this?

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That that degree of behavior would be completely unsympathetic to both jurists and jurors, pretty much guaranteeing it would get slapped down in court eventually, even if totally legit

That’d be my read too. You can definitely be “too clever.” Laws aren’t like computer code. They’re interpreted by humans. And, if you’re “too cute” and violate the spirit of the law, you can quickly find yourself on the wrong side.

I think you're making a mistake. The primary intention behind warrant canaries isn't to shield you from legal retaliation, but to make it very hard to /legally/ force you to lie directly or by omission.

IMO it's questionable if a court in the US couldn't force you to continue signing it once they have the appropriate gag order, not signing the canary would be communicating to others you have a warrant with gag order and therefore not signing it would constitute speech which you aren't allowed to disclose as per gag order.

I've heard that Google asks you re-sign ToS if there's been a request by authorities to access your email account.

That sounds urban legend-y, and it seems like you'd get an insane number of false positives every time something like GDPR rolls around.

It's difficult to imagine how this could be implemented in practice without automation. Stopping an automatic process seems more like action than inaction. With a site-wide canary, an person updates the document and asks legal to confirm that the new version is accurate - the update isn't automatic.

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