Hacker News Reader

Comment by behringer | Hacker News Reader

Call me crazy, but I think this is exactly how warrants should be done. Very specific in both time and place, and used to catch a criminal that did a very severe crime.

If you had been caught up, you 100 percent should have been scrutinized. Imagine if it was someone you loved a witness to a terrible crime and her car was set on fire. You'd definitely want the police to prove who it was.

View on HN

I'd want worse than just having the police find the guy. That's one of the major purposes of having a centralized justice system; it protects society from our individual impulses that people who wrong us must be punished at any cost.

Great answer! This is what Dukakis should have said to Bush about Willie Horton.

Google as a private corporation should not be collecting evidence for the police before a crime as occurred. Spying and surveillance of the general public should never be accepted as the norm.

But they do and we all know they do... By default we can see our own search history.

You seeing your own search history does not imply google is able to see your search history. Especially if you don't use their browser.

I highly doubt the police could have traced this back to the criminal if he wasn't logged in and didn't use his normal IP, for example, if he had used in private browsing on a VPN it would have taken someone like the NSA to track him down.

I wonder what would happen if he searched those keywords in incognito mode.

Google probably could link the incognito session with the real user session. But would it turn up in a search warrant ?

In this case, they used the IP address, so I guess incognito wouldn't help.

Right, I'm suggesting that we generate push back as much as possible. One way to do that is to make future Google employees hesitate about supporting their unethical anti-privacy practices. Nerds have to stop giving Google a free pass.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com