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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

> “If we reasonably believe that we can prevent someone from dying or from suffering serious physical harm, we may provide information to a government agency — for example, in the case of bomb threats, school shootings, kidnappings, suicide prevention, and missing person cases,” reads Google’s TOS page on government requests for user information. “We still consider these requests in light of applicable laws and our policies.”

So this is just an article pointing out something in the TOS.

National security requests are common for any big company[0-2] since they'd rather play ball today, under their own terms, than resist and trigger new legislation that forces them to hand over information in any warrantless circumstance.

0: https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/us.html

1: https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/us-national-...

2: https://transparency.fb.com/data/government-data-requests/

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Maybe this would just make me a bad service admin, but if I believed that I would be literally saving someone's life by sharing data from one of my users with law enforcement, I would be hard pressed to hold their privacy above another's life.

Exactly what it takes to be reasonably convinced that I would be saving someone's life is of course not a simple question, but in at least some situations it seems like it would be worth the tradeoff.

One that I've run into several times is suicide. Most of the time, the person isn't in immediate danger. I've been around when people were.

I'm not going to go into any detail for people's privacy, but it took over an hour to figure out who a regular member of a community was in real life and then get emergency services in another country to them. Got independent confirmation they got dragged to a hospital in time. They weren't exactly grateful afterwards, but they stayed in the community and didn't repeat the attempt.

Faked requests for situations like this are routinely and frequently used for harassment/attempted murder in gaming. Unless this is solvable, this is rather problematic and dangerous.

Maybe I should have clarified, I don’t act on the vast majority of things in this manner, especially when I don’t know the person or the circumstances. Unless I have some method of confirmation, escalating to emergency services is not happening. Even then, it’s last resort for precisely this reason.

Why not end to end encryption so we don’t need to even discuss this.

I think you're probably right in your analysis of their thought process, but I'd almost rather they force legislation's hand. Then there's a chance to hold elected officials accountable if they pass it, and there's a chance (IANAL) for a Supreme Court to throw it out as violation of the 4th amendment to the US Constitution.

Even in the worst case (law passes, court upholds, and people re-elect the politicians) at least we have a definition somewhere on what is and what isn't ok. Today where it's ambiguous and "Company X may or may not" leaves a person to wonder.

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