Google is giving data to police based on search keywords, court docs show

cnet.com

27 points·revicon··8 comments

Well if the search results are as accurate as mine are, all this is likely to be doing is wasting police resources/time.

Search quality fell off a cliff in the last few years. I can’t even get accurate results for technical queries with quotes and verbatim anymore. I don’t even mean obscure stuff, just stuff I eventually find browsing stack overflow after my Google searches fail completely.

The past 6 months has seen a marked decline in the quality of results for anything techincal. It's all just SEO spam and SEO results that are ripped from SO or other answer sites. Doesn't matter if you use another 'engine' as they all pull from Google.

If you have a nebulous question it's pretty darn good at deducing what you want, but this exact ensmartening has caused the issues when searching technical things. Hell, even verbatim mode under tools doesn't work 100% anymore.

It's terrible how unsurpsing this is. :(

Why is it terrible that a company responds to court orders?

It is neither terrible nor a shock when a company headquatered in the US, operating in the US, complies with a valid signed court order from a US court.

Because keyword warrants evade the Fourth Amendment checks on police surveillance and are very likely unconstitutional.

Then file a brief and take it to the supreme court.

Google collecting enough data to be used for this purpose is, in my opinion, not a good thing

Nobody is holding a gun to your head forcing you to type every query that pops into your head into google search.

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