Police ask for whole city's Google searches, and a judge says yes
I&#x27;m trying to see what the big deal is here (relax, I&#x27;ll explain).<p>Police are not asking for the entire search history of everyone in the town, then combing through it to see what they&#x27;ve searched for.  Rather, police are asking Google who, in a narrow amount of time, searched for the name of a relatively unknown person who had $28K stolen from him.<p>Is this really that different from police asking for security camera footage from a convenience store after a robbery?  In either case, obviously innocent bystanders will be quickly eliminated from the list of possible suspects.  Any remaining suspect(s) will still need to be (1) charged, (2) have a judge allow the evidence in court, and (3) convicted on the basis of evidence beyond reasonable doubt by a jury of their peers.<p>Unfortunately, I think obvious invasions of privacy (e.g., PRISM) have made folks very jumpy about <i>any</i> electronic evidence collection, which I don&#x27;t think is warranted.<p>EDIT:  Thanks to guelo for pointing out that this was an unsuccessful attempt at wire fraud, so the victim (fortunately) retained the $28K.  I missed that previously.