>And this is why judges are involved in the process of issuing warrants and grand juries in the process of issuing subpoenas when the police or a prosecutor want to compel the production of evidence of that sort.
That's the issue, court orders aren't free to make and factors like "it is filming a public street" are taken into account. There isn't anything "public" about "viewing a video stored on a server of a large private website". And there enlies the rub.
Also, the story here isn't just "get me a list of 30k people who watched a video", which may be reasonable:
>The court orders show the government telling Google to provide the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google account users who accessed the YouTube videos between January 1 and January 8, 2023. The government also wanted the IP addresses of non-Google account owners who viewed the videos.
They want ALL your Google activity for a week, because you watched a video that may or may not have been recommended to you by Google itself. that can include schedules, emails, financial transactions, Maps inquiries, chat records, etc. Depends on how much you use google, but Google can power a lot of aspects of life these days.
Even if you aren't on Google you have your IP revealed for simply viewing a video. That feels like an overreach.
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The second factor is that they barely have a specific suspect. That just think "they saw this video -> they may be money laundering":
> Google to hand over the information as part of an investigation into someone who uses the name "elonmuskwhm" online.
I can't believe that passed a court order. some random handle is selling bitcoin and may have watched this video, so lets get all the data of everyone who watched this tutorial at this time.
>How are the police to do that if they can’t ask anyone for information that might bring innocent people’s names to their attention?
by narrowing it down to more than 30k people. That can be an entire town for some smaller areas
>but it feels to me that we need rules that ensure ‘coming to the attention of the police in the course of an investigation’ is genuinely harmless; not rules that assume it automatically exposes you to harm.
in my mind this is the more idealistic scenario. They've had decades to espouse this sentiment and they aren't even close to doing so.
Also, the issue is that it's not like the government deletes this data after they are done. Quite the contrary. Maybe the US government needs its own GDPR protocol so this won't be pulled up on record down the line.
That's the issue, court orders aren't free to make and factors like "it is filming a public street" are taken into account. There isn't anything "public" about "viewing a video stored on a server of a large private website". And there enlies the rub.
Also, the story here isn't just "get me a list of 30k people who watched a video", which may be reasonable:
>The court orders show the government telling Google to provide the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google account users who accessed the YouTube videos between January 1 and January 8, 2023. The government also wanted the IP addresses of non-Google account owners who viewed the videos.
They want ALL your Google activity for a week, because you watched a video that may or may not have been recommended to you by Google itself. that can include schedules, emails, financial transactions, Maps inquiries, chat records, etc. Depends on how much you use google, but Google can power a lot of aspects of life these days.
Even if you aren't on Google you have your IP revealed for simply viewing a video. That feels like an overreach.
------
The second factor is that they barely have a specific suspect. That just think "they saw this video -> they may be money laundering":
> Google to hand over the information as part of an investigation into someone who uses the name "elonmuskwhm" online.
I can't believe that passed a court order. some random handle is selling bitcoin and may have watched this video, so lets get all the data of everyone who watched this tutorial at this time.
>How are the police to do that if they can’t ask anyone for information that might bring innocent people’s names to their attention?
by narrowing it down to more than 30k people. That can be an entire town for some smaller areas
>but it feels to me that we need rules that ensure ‘coming to the attention of the police in the course of an investigation’ is genuinely harmless; not rules that assume it automatically exposes you to harm.
in my mind this is the more idealistic scenario. They've had decades to espouse this sentiment and they aren't even close to doing so.
Also, the issue is that it's not like the government deletes this data after they are done. Quite the contrary. Maybe the US government needs its own GDPR protocol so this won't be pulled up on record down the line.