I was retained as an expert witness in some of the cases involving Google, so of course I’m aware that Google keeps logs. (In general on HN I’ve found it’s always helpful to assume the person you’re arguing with might be a domain expert on the topic you’re arguing about; it’s saved me some time in the past.)

But Google’s internal logging is not the question I’m asking. I’m saying: can you find a single criminal case in the literature where police caused Google to disgorge a complete browsing history on someone who took even modest steps not to record it (ie browsed logged out.) Other than keyword search warrants, there doesn’t seem to be much. This really surprised me, since as an expert I “know” that Google has enough internal data to reconstruct this information. Yet from the outside — the experience that matters to people - they’ve managed to operate a product where real-world privacy expectations have been pretty high if you take even modest steps. I think this is where we get many of our privacy expectations from: the actual real-world lived expectations of privacy are much closer to what we want than what’s theoretically possible, or what will be possible in a future LLM-enabled surveilled world.