If you’ve ever jokingly wondered if your search or viewing history is going to “put you on some kind of list,” your concern may be more than warranted.
In now unsealed court documents reviewed by Forbes, Google was ordered to hand over the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and user activity of Youtube accounts and IP addresses that watched select YouTube videos, part of a larger criminal investigation by federal investigators.
The videos were sent by undercover police to a suspected cryptocurrency launderer under the username “elonmuskwhm.” In conversations with the bitcoin trader, investigators sent links to public YouTube tutorials on mapping via drones and augmented reality software, Forbes details. The videos were watched more than 30,000 times, presumably by thousands of users unrelated to the case.
YouTube’s parent company Google was ordered by federal investigators to quietly hand over all such viewer data for the period of Jan. 1 to Jan. 8, 2023, but Forbes couldn’t confirm if Google had complied.
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The mandated data retrieval is worrisome in itself, according to privacy experts. Federal investigators argued the request was legally justified as the data “would be relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, including by providing identification information about the perpetrators,” citing justification used by other police forces around the country. In a case out of New Hampshire, police requested similar data during the investigation of bomb threats that were being streamed live to YouTube — the order specifically requested viewership information at select time stamps during the live streams.
“With all law enforcement demands, we have a rigorous process designed to protect the privacy and constitutional rights of our users while supporting the important work of law enforcement,” Google spokesperson Matt Bryant told Forbes. “We examine each demand for legal validity, consistent with developing case law, and we routinely push back against over broad or otherwise inappropriate demands for user data, including objecting to some demands entirely.”
Privacy experts, however, are worried about the kind of precedent the court’s order creates, citing concerns over the protections of the first and fourth amendments. “This is the latest chapter in a disturbing trend where we see government agencies increasingly transforming search warrants into digital dragnets,” executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project Albert Fox-Cahn told the publication. “It’s unconstitutional, it’s terrifying, and it’s happening every day.”
Advocates have called on Google to be more transparent about its data-sharing policies for years, with fears stoked by ongoing open arrests of protestors and the creeping state-wide criminalization of abortion.
In December, Google updated its privacy policies to allow users to save their location data directly to their devices rather than the cloud, and shortened the retention time for such storage — the new policies also indirectly stunted the long-used investigatory workaround in which law enforcement officials use Google location data to target suspects.
Google has been taken to court over such concerns over the past year, including two state supreme court cases surrounding the constitutionality of keyword search warrants, which force sites to turn over an individual’s internet search data.