…… Google ordered to hand over viewer data

helen

helen

Panic Sex Lady
I just post music and movie clips. Whew.



If you watched certain YouTube videos, investigators demanded your data from Google
mashable.com
A phone showing the YouTube logo stands propped in front of a glowing red laptop.
If you've ever jokingly wondered if your search or viewing history is going to "put you on some kind of list," your concern may be more than warranted.

In now unsealed court documents reviewed by Forbes, Google was ordered to hand over the names, addresses, telephone numbers, and user activity of Youtube accounts and IP addresses that watched select YouTube videos, part of a larger criminal investigation by federal investigators.

The videos were sent by undercover police to a suspected cryptocurrency launderer under the username "elonmuskwhm." In conversations with the bitcoin trader, investigators sent links to public YouTube tutorials on mapping via drones and augmented reality software, Forbes details. The videos were watched more than 30,000 times, presumably by thousands of users unrelated to the case.

YouTube's parent company Google was ordered by federal investigators to quietly hand over all such viewer data for the period of Jan. 1 to Jan. 8, 2023, but Forbes couldn't confirm if Google had complied.

SEE ALSO: Users get a taste of Google's AI search results, unprompted

The mandated data retrieval is worrisome in itself, according to privacy experts. Federal investigators argued the request was legally justified as the data "would be relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation, including by providing identification information about the perpetrators," citing justification used by other police forces around the country. In a case out of New Hampshire, police requested similar data during the investigation of bomb threats that were being streamed live to YouTube — the order specifically requested viewership information at select time stamps during the live streams.

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"With all law enforcement demands, we have a rigorous process designed to protect the privacy and constitutional rights of our users while supporting the important work of law
enforcement," Google spokesperson Matt Bryant told Forbes. "We examine each demand for legal validity, consistent with developing case law, and we routinely push back against over broad or otherwise inappropriate demands for user data, including objecting to some demands entirely."

Privacy experts, however, are worried about the kind of precedent the court's order creates, citing concerns over the protections of the first and fourth amendments. "This is the latest chapter in a disturbing trend where we see government agencies increasingly transforming search warrants into digital dragnets," executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project Albert Fox-Cahn told the publication. "It’s unconstitutional, it’s terrifying, and it’s happening every day."
Advocates have called on Google to be more transparent about its data-sharing policies for years, with fears stoked by ongoing open arrests of protestors and the creeping state-wide criminalization of abortion.

In December, Google updated its privacy policies to allow users to save their location data directly to their devices rather than the cloud, and shortened the retention time for such storage — the new policies also indirectly stunted the long-used investigatory workaround in which law enforcement officials use Google location data to target suspects.

Google has been taken to court over such concerns over the past year, including two state supreme court cases surrounding the constitutionality of keyword search warrants, which force sites to turn over an individual's internet search data.

Topics Google Privacy YouTube

mashable.com

If you watched certain YouTube videos, investigators demanded your data from Google

Shared YouTube data prompts civil liberty worries.
mashable.com mashable.com
 
D

Delta

Has No Life - Lives on TB
One of the things I learned back in the day when I was a librarian was that when a book was checked in, all information connecting a book and the person who had checked it out was erased. If any agency wanted to know who had checked out any particular book, once that book had been checked in, we absolutely could not help them. I have no idea whether that is leftwing or right, but it protected our patrons--and saved us the hassle of dealing with the courts. I also wonder how many other libraries followed that policy, or if that is still applied. But maybe Google should have done the same thing.
 
helen

helen

Panic Sex Lady
Delta said:
One of the things I learned back in the day when I was a librarian was that when a book was checked in, all information connecting a book and the person who had checked it out was erased. If any agency wanted to know who had checked out any particular book, once that book had been checked in, we absolutely could not help them. I have no idea whether that is leftwing or right, but it protected our patrons--and saved us the hassle of dealing with the courts. I also wonder how many other libraries followed that policy, or if that is still applied. But maybe Google should have done the same thing.
Click to expand...

I think there was a court case around the time of the Patriot Act about this issue.
 
helen

helen

Panic Sex Lady
Remember When the Patriot Act Debate Was All About Library Records? — ProPublica

www.propublica.org
bush-patriot-act-630x420.jpg

In the months following the October 2001, passage of the Patriot Act, there was a heated public debate about the very provision of the law that we now know the government is using to vacuum up phone records of American citizens on a massive scale.

“A chilling intrusion” declared one op-ed in the Baltimore Sun.

But the consternation didn’t focus on anything like the mass collection of phone records.
Instead, the debate centered on something else: library records.

Salon ran a picture of a virtual Uncle Sam gazing at a startled library patron under the headline, “He knows what you’ve been checking out.” In one of many similar stories, the San Francisco Chronicle warned, “FBI checking out Americans' reading habits.”

The concern stemmed from the Patriot Act’s Section 215, which, in the case of a terrorism investigation, allows the FBI to ask a secret court to order production of “any tangible things” from a third party like a person or business. The law said this could include records, papers, documents, or books.

Civil liberties groups and librarians’ associations, which have long been fiercely protective of reader privacy, quickly raised fears of the FBI using that authority to snoop on circulation records.
The section even became known as the “library provision.”

Yet as the Guardian and others revealed this month, the government has invoked the same provision to collect metadata on phone traffic of the majority of all Americans — a far larger intrusion than anything civil libertarians warned about in their initial response.

“A person might uncharitably think of us as lacking in imagination,” says Lee Tien, a longtime attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
In a speech before casting the sole dissenting vote in the Senate against the Patriot Act, Sen. Russ Feingold did zero in on Section 215 as “an enormous expansion of authority” with “minimal judicial supervision.”

But even Feingold did not conceive of the provision being used for bulk data collection, merely mentioning the possibility of individualized cases — for example, compelling “a library to release circulation records.”
Civil liberties advocates said in interviews there is a simple reason for the disconnect: In the period immediately after the Patriot Act passed, few if any observers believed Section 215 could authorize any kind of ongoing, large-scale collection of phone data.

They argue that only a radical and incorrect interpretation of the law allows the mass surveillance program the NSA has erected on the foundation of Section 215. The ACLU contends in a lawsuit filed last week that Section 215 does not legitimately authorize the metadata program.
The reason libraries became a focal point, Tien says, is that, “People could see that those kinds of records were very seriously connected to First Amendment activity and the librarians were going to war on it.”

Even before the Patriot Act passed, the American Library Association warned members of Congress that the business records provision under consideration would “eviscerate long-standing state laws and place the confidentiality of all library users at risk.”

“The library groups have a very well-informed and active lobby,” says Elizabeth Goiten, who co-directs the Brennan Center’s Liberty and National Security Program.

So has the government ever used Section 215 to get library records? We don’t know.
Testifying before Congress in March 2011, a Justice Department official said Section 215 “has never been used against a library to obtain circulation records.”

But as with so much else about the Patriot Act, how often or even whether the government has obtained library records is secret. Section 215 imposes a gag order on people or businesses who are compelled to produce records.

The FBI has also used a separate Patriot Act provision, issuing what is known as a national security letter, to seek library patron records. One such episode prompted a successful court challenge by Connecticut librarians in 2005-06.
The government itself didn’t get around to using Section 215 to vacuum up phone metadata until five years after the Patriot Act passed, in 2006, according to a new Washington Post report. The government had been sweeping up metadata since after 9/11 but apparently was doing so without a court order.

USA Today revealed that warrantless surveillance in 2006. Around the same time, according to the Post, the telecoms asked the NSA to get a court order for the data, believing that it would offer them more protection.

On May 24, 2006 two weeks after the USA Today report, the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court decided to redefine relevant business records under Section 215 “as the entirety of a telephone company’s call database,” according to the Post.

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, says that she has for years worried about bulk collection of metadata, but believed the government might be justifying it using other provisions in the Patriot Act.

“It was a really novel idea on the part of the government that they could use 215 to get bulk phone records,” she says.

As part of the Patriot Act reauthorization of 2006, Congress changed some of the wording in Section 215. But because the government’s interpretation of the law is still secret, it’s not clear whether the changes made any difference in the court’s ultimate authorization of the metadata program.

www.propublica.org

Remember When the Patriot Act Debate Was All About Library Records?

The early debate around a key provision wasn’t about anything like mass collection of phone records.
www.propublica.org www.propublica.org
 
S

Squid

Veteran Member
If Google had complied????

Bbbbbwwwwaaa

The story inferred there was a question if the largest tech fascist that are totally in bed with, would comply with the fascist democrats…

Bbbwwwaaaa…
 
D

Delta

Has No Life - Lives on TB
The other day I received an automated phone call "from my insurance company" asking all kinds of identification questions (name, birthdate--couldn't answer anyway as I was on a rotary phone). Turns out it was indeed legitimate (I called the company), but it underscored how gullible I was about handing over security information. I asked the foreign-sounding person I eventually talked to how I could determine if a call claiming to be from them was legitimate. She put me on hold for a long time (for coffee? or to talk with a supervisor?) and finally came back and said there was no way to verify if a call purporting to be from them was genuine, but that they were very careful with my sensitive information. Well, I'll never answer a recording again, but will hang up and call the alleged company's customer service number.
 
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