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posted by martyb on Tuesday January 28 2020, @10:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the TANSTAAFL dept.

Have a Search Warrant for Data? Google Wants You to Pay:

The tech giant has begun charging U.S. law enforcement for responses to search warrants and subpoenas.

[...] Facing an increasing number of requests for its users’ information, Google began charging law enforcement and other government agencies this month for legal demands seeking data such as emails, location tracking information and search queries.

Google’s fees range from $45 for a subpoena and $60 for a wiretap to $245 for a search warrant, according to a notice sent to law enforcement officials and reviewed by The New York Times. The notice also included fees for other legal requests.

A spokesman for Google said the fees were intended in part to help offset the costs of complying with warrants and subpoenas.

Federal law allows companies to charge the government reimbursement fees of this type, but Google’s decision is a major change in how it deals with legal requests.

Some Silicon Valley companies have for years forgone such charges, which can be difficult to enforce at a large scale and could give the impression that a company aims to profit from legal searches. But privacy experts support such fees as a deterrent to overbroad surveillance.

Google has tremendous amounts of information on billions of users, and law enforcement agencies in the United States and around the world routinely submit legal requests seeking that data. In the first half of 2019, the company received more than 75,000 requests for data on nearly 165,000 accounts worldwide; one in three of those requests came from the United States.

[...] The new fees could help recover some of the costs required to fill such a large volume of legal requests, said Al Gidari, a lawyer who for years represented Google and other technology and telecommunications companies. The requests have also grown more complicated as tech companies have acquired more data and law enforcement has become more technologically sophisticated.

“None of the services were designed with exfiltrating data for law enforcement in mind,” said Mr. Gidari, who is now the consulting privacy director at Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society.

[...] In April, The Times reported that Google had been inundated with a new type of search warrant request, known as geofence searches. Drawing on an enormous Google database called Sensorvault, they provide law enforcement with the opportunity to find suspects and witnesses using location data gleaned from user devices. Those warrants often result in information on dozens or hundreds of devices, and require more extensive legal review than other requests.

[...] Google will not ask for reimbursement in some cases, including child safety investigations and life-threatening emergencies, the spokesman said.


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  • (Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 28 2020, @11:59AM (2 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 28 2020, @11:59AM (#950024)

    No need for charges, they got nothing to sell to the pigs.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by barbara hudson on Tuesday January 28 2020, @01:54PM

    by barbara hudson (6443) <barbara.Jane.hudson@icloud.com> on Tuesday January 28 2020, @01:54PM (#950050) Journal

    Anyone use gmail to contact you? Google has it. Watch YouTube or use Google Maps. Google knows what you're interested in and where you want to go. Use an Android phone? You're screwed. Visit a web site that used Google Analytics? They fingerprint your browser and combine that with your location to distinguish you from the others in your area with the same browser fingerprint. Use Ghrome? #YouGottaBeKiddingMe.

    They track you. Every way they can. Even if you never use any of their services, they sell your profile to advertisers. Same as even if you don't use Facebook, they have a shadow profile on you, and it probably includes your name, same as Google.

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  • (Score: 2) by darkfeline on Wednesday January 29 2020, @04:00AM

    by darkfeline (1030) on Wednesday January 29 2020, @04:00AM (#950449) Homepage

    One should pray that that is so, given that DuckDuckGo's founder's previous project was dedicated solely to collecting user data which was then sold to a ready bidder, along with all the data.

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