Google Searches Used in Murder Trial?

mcrbids writes "Well, the details are a bit scant, but it seems that the content of Google searches were used to help establish intent in a murder trial. Will police in the future simply serve a subpoena to Google to find out what you've been thinking about? While this use of that information makes sense, at what point does your privacy give way to public concerns? Should police be able to search through your search history for "questionable" searches before you've been arrested for a crime, and what effect would this have on the health of society?"

Comments

Note to self

[ThatGeek]

Note to self: Remeber to clear browser cache before killing someone.

Thanks for the reminder slashdot!

Re:Note to self

[Duhavid]

Note to self: Remember to do a few leading searches on the computer of the person I am trying to frame for a crime.

Obvious Answer

[Transient0]

The stated use (subpeonaing google for information on a person who has been arrested and they are building a case against) is perfectly reasonable, assuming they have reason to believe google would have useful evidence. That's what happens when you get arrested, they try to collect evidence to use against you from any source the can.

And of course, the slippery slope case presented in the intro copy would NOT be reasonable. If i am arrested for valid suspicion i would expect them to try to build a case against me. But, in a free society, it is not acceptable to have everything i do fed into a system which is flagging people as POTENTIAL criminals.

so: yes. and no.

Re:Obvious Answer

[Seumas]

I have not read the article (look at my UID, I've obviously spent many years being conditioned to not read articles). However, was this information gathered via google or just by searching this guy's cache? Or was it gathered by getting his login information for his google account from him (or his computer) and then doing a search of his history?

The reason I ask is that google talks about how the information they gather (including in search history, I guess?) is aggregated and in no way identifiable and linkable to an individual. So, then, how could a subpeona to google result in anything useful being returned?

However, this isn't a huge deal, really. I'm not one of those detestable "if you have nothing to hide, why do you care?" idiots, but the thing to learn here is that it's okay to look up "snap" and "neck" and even "how to murder someone" via google or any other engine. However, if you actually ARE going to murder someone, you probably should not look up "snap" and "neck" or "how to murder someone" via google. Or, rather, if the authorities are trying to tie a suspect to a murder, he is not going to be convicted soley on a few google searches. It will just be additional circumstancial evidence to add to the pot.

These sort of things only become a problem when they start seeking out suspects and disrupting innocent people's lives because the people made particular searches in a search engine. So rather than saying "We're pretty sure this guy killed this other person and we want to see his google history", they start going through all of google's data and investigating every person with suspiciously strange search keywords just in case whoever they are have committed whatever crime against whatever unknowned victims and are suspects soley because of the information they sought.

Re:Obvious Answer

[Yottabyte84]

According to the article, this information was recoverd from his computer.

Bad affect, exposes the obvious

[external400kdiskette]

that a lot of bored people in the supposed privacy of their own home will search for a lot of crazy things that in 99.99% of cases they have no intention of carrying out.

RTFA

[Jeian]

The information on the searches came from his browser history, not from Google.

Let's conduct an experiment...

[aurb]

*launches google*

*types "how to bomb white house"...*

**KNOCK KNOCK**

"Who's th....

Already done

[dg41]

This isn't new. Last year, I was a juror on a trial for various sex/computer crimes, and part of the evidence admitted were the search strings from Google in the IE history/cache. In the interest of keeping my lunch down, I'm not going to reprint some of the searches here. We'll just say that they're bad.

Re:Already done

[Seumas]

Who hasn't done some weird ass searches, though? Hell, I've done searches on the old "26 ways to kill a person" howto. That doesn't mean I'm going to do it. But if I've killed someone and they then use my searches as *additional* evidence in my trial, there's no problem with that. Just don't go out hunting blindly through every individual that's done that search to pin a crime on them.

Re:Clueless!

[Anonymous Coward]

How would Google know what someone has been thinking about?

They're Google.

Sounds like Madison Ave. material to me...

[toupsie]

Need information to help with killing your wife? Choose Altavista, the Cops would never think to ask us!

Visit altavista.com and search "Snap Neck"

Re:Clueless!

[dubl-u]

Don't even get me started about my porn perferences ;)

Dude, that you perforate your porn is TMI.

Re:Clueless!

[Agarax]

Evidence like this is usually used in conjunction with other evidence. Like if they think you set off a pipe bomb they could use reciepts of you buying PVC pipe, duct tape, and a bunch of nails, a pound of C4 found in your apartment, along with a search on "how to build a pipe bomb" to get a conviction.