Pa. high court rules that police can access Google searches without a warrant

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that police did not need a warrant to obtain a convicted rapist’s Google searches when investigating the crime.

In its opinion, the court said that internet users making searches have no reasonable right to privacy because “it is common knowledge that websites, internet-based applications, and internet service providers collect, and then sell, user data.”

The case only creates legal precedent in Pennsylvania, but an expert predicted that the ruling will lead more police departments to feel confident about warrantless searches for internet queries.

“If a rather progressive state like Pennsylvania gives the green light to warrantless collection of your search queries, I think it fair to say that is going to open up its use across the nation,” said Andrew Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University and the author of the forthcoming book “Your Data Will Be Used Against You.”

Police in the case before the court had hit a dead end in their probe of a rape. As a last attempt to find the rapist, they asked Google to produce a list showing anyone who had searched for the victim’s address in the week before the rape and home invasion occurred.

Google found a hit and told police that someone at an IEP address tied to the home of the defendant in the case, John Edward Kurtz, had looked up the victim’s address a few hours before the crime took place.

The court noted that Google’s privacy policy is explicit about the fact that it will share search histories with third parties.

“In the case before us, Google went beyond subtle indicators,” the opinion says. “Google expressly informed its users that one should not expect any privacy when using its services.” 

The court also said that internet users have the ability to not expose their data by using different methods for finding information.

“The data trail created by using the internet is not involuntary in the same way that the trail created by carrying a cell phone is,” according to the opinion.

Ferguson said the decision is an important development on a hotly contested and developing legal question. Allowing police to access Google searches without a warrant creates a “chilling environment,” he said, pointing out that many people ask Google questions they wouldn’t ask even their spouses.

“The danger of a reverse keyword search is that it allows the police to rummage through our digital questions and queries and thus, by inference, our minds,” Ferguson said. “A list of your questions to Google is a direct link to your thinking, and we usually try to prevent the government from having access to that information.”