As sad as it is to admit it, it is not surprising to me. Worse, given the nature of my job, it is almost a given that some of my searches and queries are a part of an undesirable list somewhere. It is a problem. I am not trying to diminish it.
But the real problem is that general population has zero to no issue with it. They barely comprehend the scope of what is happening. I am not sure it registers at all. Last time I talked to my wife about it, she said she has nothing to hide and I had to resist the urge to just plop her internet history open to make it a teachable moment. I had this conversation once before. It is not fun and I don't want a repeat.
The general population is highly domesticated. The defining aspect of domestication is the surrender of one's capacity to do violence in exchange for peaceful symbiosis. The domesticated are accustomed to filling rigid roles in society -- a society they believe to be benevolent and infinitely stable.
Those of us that are not so domesticated, we wild ones, we who intimately comprehend history because we understand the nature of violence and power, are dying with anxiety as centralized powers gain more and more power over us every year.
Your wife has no understanding of violence and power, i.e., she is domesticated. That's why she has "nothing to hide."
The funny thing is, people have been aware of this property of human nature for thousands of years, but every generation that lives through hard times is shocked when they are forced to rediscover these principles -- as you seem to be discovering. If you continue to investigate why your wife thinks as she does, you'll come to the points I've made above and the behavior of the compliant masses will make much more sense -- and will leave you with quite a terrible feeling if you truly come to understand how most people will pretty much blindly comply with any prevailing authority that has seized the capacity to commit violence.
I suspect there may be some bias in your data gathering, because that's not what's reflected in the statistical surveys I've seen.
"Americans are concerned about how much data is being collected about them, and many feel their information is less secure than it used to be. The majority of Americans say they are at least somewhat concerned about how much data is collected about them by both companies (79%) and the government (64%). Additionally, seven-in-ten Americans say they feel their personal information is less secure than it was five years ago. This compares with just 6% who say they feel their information is more secure, and about one-quarter (24%) who feel it’s about the same."
> But the real problem is that general population has zero to no issue with it.
It’s really tough to make this case. You can ask someone whether they’re worried about tracking and likely get a “no,” but if you put a “allow app to track” button they’ll also click “no,” and if you ask how they feel about a concrete specific data collection, they’ll often say they don’t like it.
Sir, I would ask your wife if it is OK to share all the usernames and passwords of all websites she has signed up to a stranger. And if she says NO, ask her if she wont share what she know are in her field of view, how can she be sure about the things/data she don't know about knowing big corps put money over your interest at first?
I think tht even today with the internet it takes a good detective to sort through all of the evidence. There are easy answers and there are the correct answers, in between truth. With AI it will only get more difficult. You have shot spotters, license plate reader and gps with no warranty.
In principle I don't have a problem with the police getting a warrant to find out who searched for a specific name or place in a constrained time frame. It's a bit like the police asking the library who checked out a specific book.
The problem is that this could obviously be used with keywords that target a wide group of people, e.g. finding everyone who plans to attend a protest. If we continue to allow keyword warrants we should add a law limiting their reach, e.g. by limiting the number of people who can be revealed in the answer to any one such warrant.
> It's a bit like the police asking the library who checked out a specific book.
And you have no problem with this? Government and police looking into and judging you based on what you read is one step away from policing wrongthink. You can't learn anything deemed dangerous anymore without being arrested. Can't look up how a bomb or sarin gas works without SWAT coming down on you because you're obviously a terrorist.
This government collusion with Google is the same thing. Government and police show up and say "find me a list of people who searched for dangerous knowledge". This is normal now, without even the trepidation depicted in films like Se7en.
I always thought that it was generally accepted that if people tried to get hold of your library-loan records; that that was a red line. You can't call a place a free country if the police can ask for your library information.
For instance: In the Netherlands, libraries tend(ed) to destroy your loaned-book information ~ when the books were returned. (They seem to have since picked up some data-mining habits?)
>"If we continue to allow keyword warrants we should add a law limiting their reach, e.g. by limiting the number of people who can be revealed in the answer to any one such warrant."
What's frustrating is that that limit is already present in the constitution itself: "upon probable cause... and... *particularly* describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized". "Particularly" isn't syntactic sugar; it is a word with meaning. "Specifically, uniquely or individually";
"In detail; with regard to particulars". Mass/dragnet/geofence warrants aren't constitutional.
Why would a library have records of who borrowed what?
The old manual system in the UK worked on a system where your library card was a sort of envelope into which the book's card was placed and then it was placed in a tray in chronological order. When you returned the book you got your card back and there was no trace.
The library would only be able to say who had the book at the moment when they were asked not for times in the past.
Most people do not have unique names. The number of unique names in the USA is estimated to be around 750,000 (using census data). Out of a population of 330,000,000 people. Which means, on average, 440 people will have the same name.
And these names will be clustered in population centers because people cluster in population centers. And since surnames are generally familial, people with the same names are very likely to live near other people with the same name.
You can use public records searches to find people nearby with the same name as you. You might be surprised at how common it is to have people near you with the same name. There are a few people locally who share a name with me, and who own businesses that probably get a decent amount of internet traffic based on name searches.
> It's a bit like the police asking the library who checked out a specific book.
After the patriot act was passed enabling the government to seek this kind of information my local library changed their records policy to not retain information on who checked out books after they were returned (or at least only for a strictly limited time after), as well as a host of other pieces of data-minimization. My library also put up signs explaining how to use the library most privately (e.g. that if you visit and read books on-site no one will ever collect your name or other personal information).
I understand many other libraries did as well and that the ALA promoted such changes.
Access to your library history is a violation of your mental privacy. Imagine you found yourself questioning your sexuality, -- you might check out books on the subject. A few years later a repressive regime could come into power and you might find our that your inquisitiveness a few years back placed you under enhanced scrutiny.
Because the access to search is even more casual the invasion is even more severe. And unlike your local library Google is MUCH less likely to consider your personal freedom a big priority.
Interesting to confirm that this has actually been done. I wonder if there's really any process around it.
It doesn't seem so bad to do it for something super-specific, like the home address of the victim of a crime, in the timeframe that the crime was committed, where you expect to get under 10 individuals. What's more worrying is how broad could this get? Are there any actual legal limits, or does Google just give the Government whatever they ask for?
It seems more and more like some of the tech majors are so big and so dominant over the industry and our lives that it makes less sense to treat them as private companies. In theory, under current legal dogma, Google is a private corporation, and I have no rights at all to data it gathers, so it can hand it over to the Government anytime it feels like it with no knowledge or due process. Even if they claim they only share information for the Right Cases, how do you know, how can you trust them? Do you have any recourse if you think your case was not justified?
Maybe. If this person was, for example, online dating, a member of a popular club, had a YT/TikTok channel, or shared a name with someone who does or is otherwise notable, this could be a big list.
How would you feel being suspected in a murder case because you searched for a d-list celeb who shares a name with the victim?
Argh. Clickbait article header. The header sounds like a "blanket trawl," which, I suspect, would require an NSA-grade computer to manage (which they have, so it's not beyond belief).
They were sending warrants to people that searched for particular names, addresses, etc.
Not news. We all know this has been going on for many years. It's fairly standard, in many "capital crime" cases.
>Not news. We all know this has been going on for many years.
Who is the 'we' here?
Many people may have assumed this is happening... But according to the article itself, there's less then a handful of these specific warrants being recorded/unsealed/reported in the news.
Do you have access to sources which Forbes does not where more of these warrants are documented?
From the article:
>Before this latest case, only two keyword warrants had been made public. One revealed in 2020 [...]
as always with government power you should ask if you would be alright with your political enemies on the other side of the aisle having full access to abuse the new government power, because they probably will at some point.
DuckDuckGo does save users search history. It is stated in their privacy policy:
"We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings."
Startpage's privacy policy states they do not save search history:
"We don't record your search queries
When you search, your query is automatically stripped of unnecessary metadata including your IP address and other identifying information. We send the anonymized search query to Google and return the search results to you. We don’t log your searches.
To prevent abuse such as robotic high-volume querying, we anonymously determine the frequency of popular search keywords as a part of our anti-abuse measures, while protecting your privacy."
History is likely saved by Bing. It's just that your address is not saved with it (assuming things are as DDG says, which I'm not sure how much I'd believe that). So net/net - just use Tor, and disable everything there is to disable as far as cookies and other methods of tracking.
What I don't know, even though I was in the same building with the people who handled these orders in Google Legal, is:
If you clear your Google history (as you should), can they still respond to an order like this with your name? What if you did the search from Brave or Safari, where you were not logged into Google?
From my perspective, this ability was generally assumed to be true but confirmation is interesting.
Heck, it’s even a running stand-up joke. “Ask your wife if you can look up something on her phone. Google “How to kill your husband” and hand it back to her. Congrats, you’re safe for another month!
Time to stop using Google Search or any of their services. Realistically the only one that's not replaceable ATM is YouTube but hopefully soon will be with other platforms gaining speed.
Personally I use Brave Search for 99% of my searches. They are definitely privacy based, unlike some other alternatives.
It should be clear by now that Google serves the state. The government knows Google collects all this information and they also know Google never deletes this information. Both Google and the government have an ongoing relationship where information is provided on demand. One can easily imagine that the government is very protective of their relationship with Google. They even invested in Google during the early years.
This story is a smoke screen. The government in general - that is, some branches of the government starting with the NSA - already obtains all this information, and more, automatically from Google, whether willingly or otherwise. No warrant, no specific orders, no nothing. That is part of Edward Snowden's revelations:
Many large media outlets have basically buried this fact rather quickly after the initial coverage of the revelations, and now we can have stories about how "the keyword warrant" being "one of the more contentious". Sure, it's contentious, since _more_ government bodies get easier access to some of the information, but its infraction of people's privacy is nothing compared to the vast public spying.
One should also mention the mechanism of "National Security Letters", in which the executive branch of the US federal (only?) government can compel non-govenrment entities, in secret, to provide them with whatever information they deem necessary for national security purposes:
If you haven't already, you've been able to "auto-delete" the data Google keeps on you for a while now. I think Google should be turning this on by default for everyone, but, if you are not doing this, a little more detail may be found at https://blog.google/technology/safety-security/automatically....
This only applies to "Web Activity" and "Location History" which you can also just turn off completely instead of the "auto delete every x months" option.
> so-called geofence warrants, where investigators ask Google to provide information on anyone within the location of a crime scene at a given time.
It's amazing we've become so tethered to our phones that it's just implicitly obvious that your phone's location is the same as your location. Authoritarian governments rejoice! People will voluntarily pay and cling to their tracking devices, no need to track them personally.
Sounds like a huge fishing expedition that violates what little currently remains of the 4th amendment. This kind of shit should be plainly, unequivocally illegal, and people who approved this in the first place need to be in jail.
This is one of those slippery slopes, but I dont think the uses here have gone down that slope yet.
An open ended search might be on terms related to bomb making, where curiosity might get someone labeled a potential terrorist. Here a specific person went missing and they were looking for people who searched on that specific person. It's still a net, but it's not that wide and its focused on something that already happened. They even put date ranges on the search.
I see the problem though. It's probably just a matter of time before the specificity is loosened a lot, and that would be bad.
Using a VPN provider in a country outside US jurisdiction would be recommended. Sure, they can also request the data from there with enough political pressure, but it is about putting up barriers.
This screams of government being acutely overstrained as it is but no reason to give them a hand with such deed.
You should also search for this person too. They requested data and data should be served.
It's time Google notifies every user whose data was searched for these warrants.
The notification should say:
Google has searched your data in response to a legal request from XYZ court. Google searched for the keyword "John Smith" in your Google search history. No matches were found, so no further action was taken. For more information, click HERE.
[+] [-] A4ET8a8uTh0|4 years ago|reply
But the real problem is that general population has zero to no issue with it. They barely comprehend the scope of what is happening. I am not sure it registers at all. Last time I talked to my wife about it, she said she has nothing to hide and I had to resist the urge to just plop her internet history open to make it a teachable moment. I had this conversation once before. It is not fun and I don't want a repeat.
[+] [-] WriterGuy2021|4 years ago|reply
Those of us that are not so domesticated, we wild ones, we who intimately comprehend history because we understand the nature of violence and power, are dying with anxiety as centralized powers gain more and more power over us every year.
Your wife has no understanding of violence and power, i.e., she is domesticated. That's why she has "nothing to hide."
The funny thing is, people have been aware of this property of human nature for thousands of years, but every generation that lives through hard times is shocked when they are forced to rediscover these principles -- as you seem to be discovering. If you continue to investigate why your wife thinks as she does, you'll come to the points I've made above and the behavior of the compliant masses will make much more sense -- and will leave you with quite a terrible feeling if you truly come to understand how most people will pretty much blindly comply with any prevailing authority that has seized the capacity to commit violence.
[+] [-] lsiebert|4 years ago|reply
"Americans are concerned about how much data is being collected about them, and many feel their information is less secure than it used to be. The majority of Americans say they are at least somewhat concerned about how much data is collected about them by both companies (79%) and the government (64%). Additionally, seven-in-ten Americans say they feel their personal information is less secure than it was five years ago. This compares with just 6% who say they feel their information is more secure, and about one-quarter (24%) who feel it’s about the same."
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa...
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago|reply
It’s really tough to make this case. You can ask someone whether they’re worried about tracking and likely get a “no,” but if you put a “allow app to track” button they’ll also click “no,” and if you ask how they feel about a concrete specific data collection, they’ll often say they don’t like it.
[+] [-] Gentil|4 years ago|reply
Also - https://www.privacytools.io/
[+] [-] sjg007|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wongarsu|4 years ago|reply
The problem is that this could obviously be used with keywords that target a wide group of people, e.g. finding everyone who plans to attend a protest. If we continue to allow keyword warrants we should add a law limiting their reach, e.g. by limiting the number of people who can be revealed in the answer to any one such warrant.
[+] [-] matheusmoreira|4 years ago|reply
And you have no problem with this? Government and police looking into and judging you based on what you read is one step away from policing wrongthink. You can't learn anything deemed dangerous anymore without being arrested. Can't look up how a bomb or sarin gas works without SWAT coming down on you because you're obviously a terrorist.
This government collusion with Google is the same thing. Government and police show up and say "find me a list of people who searched for dangerous knowledge". This is normal now, without even the trepidation depicted in films like Se7en.
[+] [-] Kim_Bruning|4 years ago|reply
For instance: In the Netherlands, libraries tend(ed) to destroy your loaned-book information ~ when the books were returned. (They seem to have since picked up some data-mining habits?)
[+] [-] perihelions|4 years ago|reply
What's frustrating is that that limit is already present in the constitution itself: "upon probable cause... and... *particularly* describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized". "Particularly" isn't syntactic sugar; it is a word with meaning. "Specifically, uniquely or individually"; "In detail; with regard to particulars". Mass/dragnet/geofence warrants aren't constitutional.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/particularly#Adverb
Plenty of federal judges seem to agree,
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/08/new-federal-court-ruli...
"...geofence warrant violates the Fourth Amendment’s probable cause and particularity requirements"*
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|4 years ago|reply
The old manual system in the UK worked on a system where your library card was a sort of envelope into which the book's card was placed and then it was placed in a tray in chronological order. When you returned the book you got your card back and there was no trace.
The library would only be able to say who had the book at the moment when they were asked not for times in the past.
See https://www.1900s.org.uk/1940s50s-library-systems.htm
[+] [-] mywittyname|4 years ago|reply
And these names will be clustered in population centers because people cluster in population centers. And since surnames are generally familial, people with the same names are very likely to live near other people with the same name.
You can use public records searches to find people nearby with the same name as you. You might be surprised at how common it is to have people near you with the same name. There are a few people locally who share a name with me, and who own businesses that probably get a decent amount of internet traffic based on name searches.
[+] [-] nullc|4 years ago|reply
After the patriot act was passed enabling the government to seek this kind of information my local library changed their records policy to not retain information on who checked out books after they were returned (or at least only for a strictly limited time after), as well as a host of other pieces of data-minimization. My library also put up signs explaining how to use the library most privately (e.g. that if you visit and read books on-site no one will ever collect your name or other personal information).
I understand many other libraries did as well and that the ALA promoted such changes.
Access to your library history is a violation of your mental privacy. Imagine you found yourself questioning your sexuality, -- you might check out books on the subject. A few years later a repressive regime could come into power and you might find our that your inquisitiveness a few years back placed you under enhanced scrutiny.
Because the access to search is even more casual the invasion is even more severe. And unlike your local library Google is MUCH less likely to consider your personal freedom a big priority.
[+] [-] TeeMassive|4 years ago|reply
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/05/nsa-surveillan...
https://slate.com/technology/2015/06/usa-freedom-act-before-...
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ur-whale|4 years ago|reply
Wow. So, people like you actually do exist. This is both scary and sad.
[+] [-] ufmace|4 years ago|reply
It doesn't seem so bad to do it for something super-specific, like the home address of the victim of a crime, in the timeframe that the crime was committed, where you expect to get under 10 individuals. What's more worrying is how broad could this get? Are there any actual legal limits, or does Google just give the Government whatever they ask for?
It seems more and more like some of the tech majors are so big and so dominant over the industry and our lives that it makes less sense to treat them as private companies. In theory, under current legal dogma, Google is a private corporation, and I have no rights at all to data it gathers, so it can hand it over to the Government anytime it feels like it with no knowledge or due process. Even if they claim they only share information for the Right Cases, how do you know, how can you trust them? Do you have any recourse if you think your case was not justified?
[+] [-] mywittyname|4 years ago|reply
Maybe. If this person was, for example, online dating, a member of a popular club, had a YT/TikTok channel, or shared a name with someone who does or is otherwise notable, this could be a big list.
How would you feel being suspected in a murder case because you searched for a d-list celeb who shares a name with the victim?
[+] [-] ChrisMarshallNY|4 years ago|reply
They were sending warrants to people that searched for particular names, addresses, etc.
Not news. We all know this has been going on for many years. It's fairly standard, in many "capital crime" cases.
[+] [-] ziddoap|4 years ago|reply
Who is the 'we' here?
Many people may have assumed this is happening... But according to the article itself, there's less then a handful of these specific warrants being recorded/unsealed/reported in the news.
Do you have access to sources which Forbes does not where more of these warrants are documented?
From the article:
>Before this latest case, only two keyword warrants had been made public. One revealed in 2020 [...]
[+] [-] ziml77|4 years ago|reply
The request is limited to searches for a couple specific people over a short timeframe. They had legitimate reason for it. There's no issue here.
[+] [-] ren_engineer|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] goalieca|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] panarky|4 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27394925
[+] [-] midnightGhost|4 years ago|reply
"We also save searches, but again, not in a personally identifiable way, as we do not store IP addresses or unique User agent strings. We use aggregate, non-personal search data to improve things like misspellings."
Startpage's privacy policy states they do not save search history:
"We don't record your search queries
When you search, your query is automatically stripped of unnecessary metadata including your IP address and other identifying information. We send the anonymized search query to Google and return the search results to you. We don’t log your searches.
To prevent abuse such as robotic high-volume querying, we anonymously determine the frequency of popular search keywords as a part of our anti-abuse measures, while protecting your privacy."
[+] [-] pugworthy|4 years ago|reply
You can trust them if you want, but really can you trust any company now days?
[+] [-] m0zg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] AlbertCory|4 years ago|reply
If you clear your Google history (as you should), can they still respond to an order like this with your name? What if you did the search from Brave or Safari, where you were not logged into Google?
[+] [-] randombits0|4 years ago|reply
Heck, it’s even a running stand-up joke. “Ask your wife if you can look up something on her phone. Google “How to kill your husband” and hand it back to her. Congrats, you’re safe for another month!
[+] [-] _yoqn|4 years ago|reply
Personally I use Brave Search for 99% of my searches. They are definitely privacy based, unlike some other alternatives.
[+] [-] therealbilly|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] einpoklum|4 years ago|reply
https://wiki.openrightsgroup.org/wiki/Guardian_and_Snowden_r...
Many large media outlets have basically buried this fact rather quickly after the initial coverage of the revelations, and now we can have stories about how "the keyword warrant" being "one of the more contentious". Sure, it's contentious, since _more_ government bodies get easier access to some of the information, but its infraction of people's privacy is nothing compared to the vast public spying.
One should also mention the mechanism of "National Security Letters", in which the executive branch of the US federal (only?) government can compel non-govenrment entities, in secret, to provide them with whatever information they deem necessary for national security purposes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter
[+] [-] binkHN|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kwhitefoot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Ir0nMan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] air7|4 years ago|reply
It's amazing we've become so tethered to our phones that it's just implicitly obvious that your phone's location is the same as your location. Authoritarian governments rejoice! People will voluntarily pay and cling to their tracking devices, no need to track them personally.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] cma|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] m0zg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phkahler|4 years ago|reply
An open ended search might be on terms related to bomb making, where curiosity might get someone labeled a potential terrorist. Here a specific person went missing and they were looking for people who searched on that specific person. It's still a net, but it's not that wide and its focused on something that already happened. They even put date ranges on the search.
I see the problem though. It's probably just a matter of time before the specificity is loosened a lot, and that would be bad.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] raxxorrax|4 years ago|reply
This screams of government being acutely overstrained as it is but no reason to give them a hand with such deed.
You should also search for this person too. They requested data and data should be served.
[+] [-] RobRivera|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sneeeeeed|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] londons_explore|4 years ago|reply
The notification should say:
Google has searched your data in response to a legal request from XYZ court. Google searched for the keyword "John Smith" in your Google search history. No matches were found, so no further action was taken. For more information, click HERE.