Police try to consult Google as an oracle in this manner because Google is a search monopoly. Otherwise there would be an insufficient connection to events under investigation.
Keyword warrants tend to be bad because of how broad they are. In my opinion, this was different. They used a small window of time and only used "keywords" that were the personal information of the victims. That's very different from searching for "where to get an abortion". Now they have to figure out exactly where that line is and how to define it.
I'm not sure what you expect for "proof" but elsewhere they specifically give some examples of where they do it: https://safety.google/privacy/data/
> To offer features like place busyness in Maps, we apply an advanced anonymization technology called differential privacy that adds noise to your information so it can’t be used to personally identify you.
That may correlate to a given host, device, or customer connection, but none of those are natural persons.
Who had control of said device on that connection? Was a child using it? Remote-execution malware or a botnet? Was a criminal hacking their home WiFi?
You absolutely cannot map an IP address to a person, without additional forensic evidence that usually entails some non-technical circumstances as well.
This is a pedantic and pointless distinction given the fact that the law regularly does in fact map IP addresses to people without additional forensic evidence. People are successfully convicted on the basis of an IP correlation to a device owned by an individual.
Juries aren't going to care about this distinction because the CSI effect makes it seem like anything technical is basically an immutable fingerprint.
In this case they clearly are as the IP address was traced to a particular person.
I think it’s more accurate to say “IP addresses are not always people” but they frequently are identifiers and enough to be useful in these cases. So it’s a bit of an odd statement to make regarding a case where the ip address literally uniquely identified someone.
It’s like saying “fingerprints aren’t people” in a case about fingerprints linking to an individual.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 57.7 ms ] threadRemember when the corporate line was that your personal data and search history was all anonymized? Clearly not true.
When was this ever claimed?
But the mere fact that they took the time to describe how does tend to corroborate that they did claim to do it.
> To offer features like place busyness in Maps, we apply an advanced anonymization technology called differential privacy that adds noise to your information so it can’t be used to personally identify you.
Who had control of said device on that connection? Was a child using it? Remote-execution malware or a botnet? Was a criminal hacking their home WiFi?
You absolutely cannot map an IP address to a person, without additional forensic evidence that usually entails some non-technical circumstances as well.
Maybe you can't ... but people sitting on jury do this all the time.
Juries aren't going to care about this distinction because the CSI effect makes it seem like anything technical is basically an immutable fingerprint.
I think it’s more accurate to say “IP addresses are not always people” but they frequently are identifiers and enough to be useful in these cases. So it’s a bit of an odd statement to make regarding a case where the ip address literally uniquely identified someone.
It’s like saying “fingerprints aren’t people” in a case about fingerprints linking to an individual.