Google Search Data Technique Used by Police Draws New Legal Challenge
Civil liberties advocates are mounting a new challenge to the use by police of Google search data for help solving criminal cases, as the practice draws greater scrutiny nationwide. After a Pennsylvania woman was raped in 2016, police submitted a search warrant to Alphabet's Google for information about users who had typed the victim's name or address into the search engine in the week leading up to the attack, according to court papers. Google responded with the IP address of a user who had searched for the victim's address twice shortly before the incident, court papers show. That breakthrough prompted police to begin monitoring a corrections officer, who was ultimately arrested and convicted.
On Friday, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and its Pennsylvania chapter argued in a court filing that the investigative technique used in the case, known as a keyword search warrant, is dangerously broad and threatens to infringe on the privacy rights of innocent people.
“Keyword search warrants are digital dragnets giving the government permission to rummage through our most private information, and the Pennsylvania Supreme Court should find them unconstitutional,” NACDL Fourth Amendment Center Litigation Director Michael Price said in a statement.
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A lawyer for the defendant and a representative for Google didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
There are few known examples of keyword search warrants, but the practice has come under scrutiny in the wake of the US Supreme Court's decision to overturn the right to abortion. Privacy advocates have warned that keyword search warrants and geofence warrants, in which police ask
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