Comment by shadowgovt
3 years ago
Consider the circumstances. The context in which this data is shared is imminent danger to life. That includes kidnapping.
If Google had a magic system for getting information to a kidnapping victim reliably, they wouldn't need to share user's private data with law enforcement, they could just share the information on where to reach the kidnap victim.
You don't fool me.
What this will predominantly be used for is abusive partners, who also happen to be law enforcement officers (police) to terrorise their victims, or, more generally, abuse of powers by LE.
Here in Australia the police already have 30% more domestic violence charges than the average, and have been caught way too many times abusing their powers as LE.
This was used 7 times in the USA. 7.
Also, a cop doing this would leave a trail of evidence of their irrefutable guilt.
You're being hyperbolic.
>The context in which this data is shared is imminent danger to life.
Not at all - it's merely somebody's _claim_ that there's some danger.
A subpoena is based on merely somebody's claim that there's reasonable suspicion of a crime. All this policy by Google does is shift the set of people who are making the decision of what "reasonable suspicion" looks like; one's reaction to that depends on one's relative threat models of judges (and time delay of interacting with judges) vs. Google employees.
FWIW, anyone still doing business with Google probably has a relatively high trust of Google, so that comparison is probably closer to equivalent than many might imagine for Google's users.