Google cares deeply about privacy. Google defines privacy as them not giving your private data that they have collected to anyone who hasn't paid them for it or can compel them to give it up.
replyThere's a fourth amendment case on the Supreme Court docket (Chatrie v. U.S.) about Google searching a massive amount of user data to find people in a location at a specific time, at police request. The case is about whether the police's warrant warranted such a wide scope of search (if general warrants are allowed).
replyPoint being: Google will 100% give your info to the police, regardless of whether the police have the legal right to it or not, and regardless of whether you actually committed a crime or not.
Bonus points: the federal court that ruled on the case said that it likely violated the fourth amendment, but they allowed the police to admit the evidence anyway because of the "good faith" clause, which is a new one for me. Time to add it to the list of horribly abusable exceptions (qualified immunity, civil asset forfeiture, and eminent domain coming to mind).
They knowingly participated in PRISM, too.
replyWhy would the police go to all that hassle of compelling google to give it up when it can simply buy it on the open market.
replyPolice do hit up google for data though.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/google-tracked-his-bike...
replySo no compelling here. The police asked for it and google gave it, either for free or in exchange for money. They didn't say "no" to the police, they didn't wait for a court order.
replyThe bad guy here is google. And the people that champion data collection by private companies because of free market == good.
In that case, the main bad guy was the police who didn't bother to do even the most basic investigating after "check Google's GPS records to see who was at the house" including "Check Google's GPS records to see how how long they were there" which would have shown them this was a drive by, but yeah Google is absolutely a villain
replyThe breaking point with me that caused me to de-google myself was finding out that Google was buying Mastercard records in order to cross-reference them with Android phone data. That shit is not okay.
replyAh yes, I should have said I was describing the official line, not the behaviour. In all fairness the “can compel them to give it up” doesn’t seem to be optional but otherwise, yeah. Agreed.
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