US police use Google keyword searches to find suspects challenged

On August 5, 2020, three adults and two young children were killed in an arson attack on a Senegalese immigrant home in Denver. Police arrested three teenagers in January 2021 for what they believe was deliberately setting the fire: two were as young as 16 and one was 15. Police identify suspects through a tool called reverse keyword searches. They obtained a search warrant from the court asking Google to find who searched the victim’s home address before August 5, 2020, from its vast database of search history. Keyword searches have been increasingly used by police to solve crimes over the past few years. But now a suspect in the case has taken the lead in challenging that approach . His lawyers argued that the police violated the Fourth Amendment’s prohibition on unreasonable searches and that all evidence should be discarded. The case has also been closely watched by privacy and abortion-rights advocates, who worry that keyword search tools will be banned from abortion states looking for women looking for abortion information in search engines.

This article is reprinted from: https://www.solidot.org/story?sid=72006
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