Google Search Technique Used by Police Draws New Legal Challenge
bnnbloomberg.ca
bnnbloomberg.ca
Remember when the corporate line was that your personal data and search history was all anonymized? Clearly not true.
When was this ever claimed?
But the mere fact that they took the time to describe how does tend to corroborate that they did claim to do it.
> To offer features like place busyness in Maps, we apply an advanced anonymization technology called differential privacy that adds noise to your information so it can’t be used to personally identify you.
I think it’s more accurate to say “IP addresses are not always people” but they frequently are identifiers and enough to be useful in these cases. So it’s a bit of an odd statement to make regarding a case where the ip address literally uniquely identified someone.
It’s like saying “fingerprints aren’t people” in a case about fingerprints linking to an individual.
Who had control of said device on that connection? Was a child using it? Remote-execution malware or a botnet? Was a criminal hacking their home WiFi?
You absolutely cannot map an IP address to a person, without additional forensic evidence that usually entails some non-technical circumstances as well.
Juries aren't going to care about this distinction because the CSI effect makes it seem like anything technical is basically an immutable fingerprint.
Maybe you can't ... but people sitting on jury do this all the time.