Police ask for whole city's Google searches, and a judge says yes
I'm trying to see what the big deal is here (relax, I'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'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'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.