Minnesota Police Looking Into an Entire City’s Google Search History

Just when you think this world couldn’t get any crazier here’s a new story for you: a judge from Minnesota issued a warrant allowing the police to collect the search history of everyone living in the city of Edina that Googled a particular term. What’s in question here is a $28,500 wire transfer theft as the burglar used a photo which was allegedly found on Google. So now everyone in the city who searched for the victim’s name will see their search history analyzed by the police, given that Google complies with the request. Are we witnessing a new kind of investigation technique or will this be yet another resemblance of the infamous Apple vs FBI case? What is certain though is that the warrant was indeed issued, which could set quite the precedent for the future of our online privacy.

Everyone’s guilty until proven otherwise

The troubled warrant was issued in the beginning of February 2017 to Edina’s City Police and grants the authorities the chance of investigating everyone who Googled a number of variations of the victim’s name between December 1st 2016 and January 7th 2017. Whoever was behind the crime, in which over $28k was stolen from a city’s resident, faxed a forged passport photoas an ID proof of someone pretending to be the account’s holder. The thing here is that when agents searched for the name on the passport, the search engine turned up the exact same photo results that were sent to the bank, while others simply… didn’t. Edina’s Police requested Google to hand in the names, addresses, phone and social security numbers, payment information, IP and MAC addresses and a whole lot more of everyone who searched the poor victim’s name on Google.

Whether Google will turn in the requested results or not is another matter, as it is actually unknown if it is even capable of doing so, due to the massive number of users that could be eligible based on the search criteria. On the other hand, if there’s one company that likes to know which steps its users take precisely, it has to be Google, so this could be the premiere of a brand new soap in court for the next few months.

Jokes apart, this could open a troubling precedent for future similar investigations, as the warrant doesn’t seem to be very precise. Although it’s indeed limited to the search terms of the victim’s name, it doesn’t aim at anyone specifically, which in reality is pretty much the same as admitting everyone could be a suspect. And looking into the online records of an entire city of a little over a month is just way too big of a scope.

These are all pretty decent but nothing compares to VPNs. They are created with heavy encryptions and specially designed protocols to ensure that you are always connected to secure servers around the world, which are also useful to hide your real location. Your IP address will be different and there’s no way Google or any other snooping organization can track your movements back to you.