If I understood the article correctly, the title is misleading.
The cops were not granted an entire raw database of all google searches by person. Instead, they were granted "'any/all user or subscriber information' of anyone in Edina who'd looked up that name between December 1, 2016, and January 7" which is IMHO a much less serious breach of privacy.
You could retort that collecting these users' "name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), dates of birth, social security numbers, email addresses, payment information, account information, IP addresses, and MAC addresses" is a serious breach of privacy, but I believe those are all available to law enforcement (save the internet-specific info).
You are quite right, and it's a shame people are downmodding you.
For some reason there is this belief that anything you do electronically should be immune to warrants, and warrants should only apply to physical documents.
Just read the comments and see, it's really astonishing.
It was the same thing with that phone the FBI was hacking, [some] people had a deep-seated belief that because it was encrypted the FBI should not be permitted to hack it!
(Some people had other issues with it, but they were a minority - most simply felt the FBI should not be allowed to try to hack a phone.)
If a bike was stolen from a street, the police do not have the right to enter and search every home on that street to see if you committed the crime. We already have the legal framework for these kinds of questions in meatspace. The courts are treating it differently because its on a computer, the same way companies are getting patents for unpatentable processes as long as they do it on the internet
Except that's a terrible analogy. A better analogy is the police are asking all the landlords to check their security cameras for someone carrying a bicycle.
Can you clarify what you mean by "all this"? Because as far as I can tell all they are asking for is the identity of the person who searched for a specific word.
Unless you are prosecuted by accident, news papers write about you and charges are dropped. You apply for a job, someone googles you and reply with "Thank you for your time. Unfortunately..."
I don't think we can assume more information increases the likelihood of false accusations. It certainly can for any given situation, but it can certainly greatly reduce the risk by identifying the real perpetrator.
If I were on trial when I was innocent, I'd really appreciate having this information available.
Though if there was empirical data to suggest that it was more risky, I could be convinced.
Because innocent people getting swept up by the legal system is potentially disastrous for those people, particularly if they are people of color. Take the Kalief Browder case as an example: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/before-the-law
However, injustices happen all over the world in varying degrees. It's important to figure out the balance of damage done / good done. If one out of 100 million people is wrongly convicted each year due to these practices, but 1 out of 50 million is rightly convicted each year, then this tool net good (even though innocent people have convicted.) This is just a simple view though, it's up to society to balance this equation (but that means not having a puritist and irrationally stubborn point).
What is the prevalence of accidental conviction due to the police having access to your limited private information?
Apart from gigantig societal issues around chilling effects and free speech related issues.
Whenever you cast a wide net you must either do significant statistical modelling or disqualify the actual results of the warrant from being considered as evidence. Ie you can not both use the results to filter the suspects _and_ use it as evidence without knowing exactly what you are doing from a statistical point of view. As badly understood statistics generally are, the required level of rigor is unlikely to be achieved.
Have you? The concept was "pre-crime" which is stopping crimes before they happened - not investigating crimes that have already conclusively been committed. Additionally, upon finding the system in use was faulty it was dismantled and everyone affected by it given a pardon.
Not saying the slippery slope argument is invalid, but the use of Minority Report is better kept to arguments where the intent is to use "big data" to predict and prevent crimes - not for when crimes have been committed and the intent is to figure out who did it.
The cops were not granted an entire raw database of all google searches by person. Instead, they were granted "'any/all user or subscriber information' of anyone in Edina who'd looked up that name between December 1, 2016, and January 7" which is IMHO a much less serious breach of privacy.
You could retort that collecting these users' "name(s), address(es), telephone number(s), dates of birth, social security numbers, email addresses, payment information, account information, IP addresses, and MAC addresses" is a serious breach of privacy, but I believe those are all available to law enforcement (save the internet-specific info).