Google surprised some folks this week when they announced their policy requires law enforcement to provide a probable cause warrant when seeking information contained in emails and documents on their cloud-storage system. Surprised because the law doesn’t require it and surprised because they simultaneously admitted that about 2/3 of the information they hand over is done so without a warrant.
Wait, so Google says they keep your most personal information private (barring a warrant), but still willingly oblige law enforcement by giving out some information simply on the basis of a please and thank you? In short, yes.
Google says that it goes above and beyond the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), which says that a warrant isn’t always necessary for emails and document retrieval that is less than 180 days old. But, they do willingly hand over other information without a warrant.
Those things that Google will give to local, state, or federal law enforcement agencies include: the name used to create a Gmail account; the IP address from which an account was created, a password was changed, or where an email was sent; where and what times you sign in and out of an account, and non-content fields of your emails like who a particular document is going to and who is cc’d.
Yes, this means law enforcement can call up Google and ask for all of this information without demonstrating they have probable cause that there is information relevant to the investigation of a crime.
Yes, this means they can know where you send your emails from, whether you tend to log in early in the morning or late at night, who you send emails to, and any user accounts registered under your name. Without a warrant.
The good news is that they are requiring a warrant for email content. In other words, Google demands a warrant to actually allow law enforcement to read the content of your emails.
While a 2010 court ruling suggested warrants are required for content requests, the Supreme Court hasn’t weighed in. So for now, Google seems like they care a little more about your privacy than the government—but, not by much.
According to Google’s own records, the United States leads the world in law enforcement requests for data. In a six month period ending December 2012, agencies requested data 8,438 times on nearly 15,000 accounts. Warrants were issued in only 1,896 of those cases. And this only represents some of the requests. The information released by Google doesn’t include those requests that fall under the Patriot Act or other “secret” investigations known as FISA orders and dragnet surveillance programs.
Interestingly, there is no data provided on what types of criminal charges the requests were about, since Google was not generally informed as to the specific nature of the information request.
As we have noted before, information in email, or published in social medial like facebook or twitter can absolutely be used against you in court, in a civil or criminal case.
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