US government forces Google to secretly hand over user data from Internet search

[German]A search for names, addresses, or phone numbers using the Google search engine can lead to Americans (and possibly others) becoming the focus of law enforcement. The U.S. government has forced Google to secretly identify any person who searched for the name, address and phone number of a sexual assault victim. Again, a reason to use a search engine that does anonymization for searches.

In this article, the news medium Forbes reports exclusively on these facts, which only became public because court documents were released in error – but have since been retracted. Forbes was able to see the search warrant, however, which reveals the facts of the case.

It was in 2019 that U.S. investigators went after men in the state of Wisconsin they believed were involved in the human trafficking and sexual abuse of a minor. The minor had disappeared in 2019 but later resurfaced claiming to have been abducted and sexually abused.

To track down the perpetrators, investigators turned to Google and asked the tech giant to provide information on all people who had searched for the victim's name, two spellings of her mother's name and her address on 16 days of the year. After being asked to provide all relevant Google accounts and IP addresses of searchers, Google turned over data in mid-2020, though court documents do not indicate for how many users the data was provided to the government.

This is probably a very rare example where so-called "keyword warrants" were used for law enforcement, in its breadth became public. In such a warrant, the search engine provider must release all data on user searches that have certain keywords.  There have been other cases in the past, described by Forbes in this article.

Google arguably faces thousands of such orders every year, but a keyword warrant is one of the most controversial search measures in the US. There is a perceived danger that innocent people in a criminal case will become the focus of investigators through this "fishing in the dark" and get caught in the prosecutors' net. Using a search engine that forwards queries anonymously to Google, Bing & Co. is at least not a mistake from this point of view.