The New Way Police Could Use Your Google Searches Against You https://share.newsbreak.com/1j23z8tj
For millennia, we’ve been told that asking questions was the path to enlightenment. But in the surveillance age, it might land you in jail. That’s the danger of a new search tactic that police are increasingly turning to in their constant campaign to transform our phones and devices into evidence against us: keyword warrants. One Denver court may soon rule on whether they can continue as a policing tactic—and in the post-Roe era, the wrong decision could put abortion seekers in unprecedented danger Police have used web browser history and search engine data in their investigations for about as long as the data has existed, but keyword warrants are different—a digital dragnet to find every user who searches for a specific person, place or thing. We don’t know how often they are used, but we the number of publicly known examples is only growing. And soon a Denver judge will provide one of the first decisions on their constitutionality. As far back as 2009, police would ask Google for a user’s search history for use in investigations, viewing a single account at a time. Where there was probable cause that someone had committed an offense, officers could compel Google to provide a list of every search a user had entered. And when individuals weren’t logged into Google, they could still search by their individual IP address, the unique identifier every internet-connected computer uses to communicate with servers at companies like Google.
