The search engine has been served with a search warrant requiring Google to hand over personally identifiable information on people from a particular town who have searched for a particular name. The public records researcher published the search warrant that requires Google to provide a wealth of information on any user in the town of Edina who has searched for a variation of a fraud victim’s name.


The records request was determined by the specifics of the fraud case: someone tried to initiate a wire transfer from the victim’s account, using a fake passport, which was illustrated with a picture of someone with the same name as the victim. The warrant points out that a Google image search of the victim’s name brings up that same image. Searches in other search engines don’t bring this result. This is why the police believe that the criminal carried out the same search in attempt to find the photo.

The search warrant was approved by the US judge in February and orders Google to hand over data on all searches for the victim’s name that took place in December and January. According to the warrant, Google must provide all available information, including names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, IP addresses and account information of the people who searched for one of the four variations of the victim’s name.

However, the experts doubt that the warrant is legally sound: for example, Webster says that “search warrants require supporting probable cause, not just mere suspicion or theory”. As such, “anyone-who-accessed” search warrants could be risky to execute, since evidence could potentially be thrown out in a pretrial motion. Besides, it can be that such investigation would catch routine and non-criminal searches of the victim’s name by innocent persons, like neighbors, prospective employers or business associates, journalists, or even friends.

The Electronic Frontiers Foundation even joked on the case, saying that it should be renamed: “Case name should be In re Minnesota Unconstitutional General Warrant.” As for Google itself, its representative told in the interview that the company could not comment on specific cases. However, it is known well that Google will always push back when it receives excessively broad requests for data about the Internet users.