Take the crime they are investigating and ignore that; it is a red herring. Say that there is a stalker who hacked someone's devices and pulled private information and videos from them, and posted them publicly. Something unequivocally bad. We would all agree that there needs to be a way to investigate and stop this person and seek justice for the victims.
Until recently, taking this to the cops would get you a blank stare and nothing would happen. At least now in certain places it is taken seriously. But traditional investigative methods don't work. They would need to get access logs to the places where that data was uploaded, at the very least.
Cops are not particularly great at investigating (most crime is solved by confessions or just catching them in the act). They don't have any reason not to just blindly grab all the data and sort through it by hand, because that's what they know how to do, and if they request it and get denied, why would they care? They either try something else or say 'fuck it'.
Local Judges see a request for records and a block of time and it seems reasonable to get that info. No one is sitting and explaining to them the implications of allowing cops access to personal information from viewer logs. Historically, the lower courts are not the place to seek enlightened rulings.
Google? I honestly have no love for them, and they bend over for China every day for worse stuff, so I would be surprised if they gave two shits about their users, except that if this becomes common enough they might actually have to devote support to these requests, and they hate giving support, so they might fight it just for their own self-interest.
The problem is that there is no settled case law here and no clear legislation, and I would hesitate to take any important cases to the Supreme Court until at least Mr. "Is This a Pube on My Coke Can" is gone.
Take the crime they are investigating and ignore that; it is a red herring. Say that there is a stalker who hacked someone's devices and pulled private information and videos from them, and posted them publicly. Something unequivocally bad. We would all agree that there needs to be a way to investigate and stop this person and seek justice for the victims.
Until recently, taking this to the cops would get you a blank stare and nothing would happen. At least now in certain places it is taken seriously. But traditional investigative methods don't work. They would need to get access logs to the places where that data was uploaded, at the very least.
Cops are not particularly great at investigating (most crime is solved by confessions or just catching them in the act). They don't have any reason not to just blindly grab all the data and sort through it by hand, because that's what they know how to do, and if they request it and get denied, why would they care? They either try something else or say 'fuck it'.
Local Judges see a request for records and a block of time and it seems reasonable to get that info. No one is sitting and explaining to them the implications of allowing cops access to personal information from viewer logs. Historically, the lower courts are not the place to seek enlightened rulings.
Google? I honestly have no love for them, and they bend over for China every day for worse stuff, so I would be surprised if they gave two shits about their users, except that if this becomes common enough they might actually have to devote support to these requests, and they hate giving support, so they might fight it just for their own self-interest.
The problem is that there is no settled case law here and no clear legislation, and I would hesitate to take any important cases to the Supreme Court until at least Mr. "Is This a Pube on My Coke Can" is gone.