What I don't know, even though I was in the same building with the people who handled these orders in Google Legal, is:
If you clear your Google history (as you should), can they still respond to an order like this with your name? What if you did the search from Brave or Safari, where you were not logged into Google?
Also what if you are logged into Google, but your Google search history was always switched off?
>What if you did the search from Brave or Safari, where you were not logged into Google?
Relevant quote from the article:
>In Wisconsin, the government was hopeful Google could also provide “CookieIDs” belonging to any users who made the searches. These CookieIDs “are identifiers that are used to group together all searches conducted from a given machine, for a certain time period. Such information allows investigators to ascertain, even when the user is not logged into a Google account, whether the same individual may have conducted multiple pertinent searches,” the government wrote.
CookieIDs are specific to one browser, are they not?
As for the argument that they can still find it: The laws usually allow for the company to decline on the grounds that complying would be an "undue burden." In other words, if their usual method is to run some program they wrote to handle the common case, and this time they'd have to write a new program, they might claim that's an undue burden.
I doubt that deleting your search history would trigger a re-write of search logs. After all your history is your data, but search logs are their data. I believe it is their published policy to remove the last octet (or 80 bits, for IPv6) from client addresses in logs after 9 months and to rewrite logs without cookies after 18 months. This probably tells us more about the fact that 18-month-old search logs are not very useful for search quality than it does about privacy.
I'm pretty sure the relevant distinction is between "Data that expires after a specific period of time" and "Information retained until you remove it" in their privacy policies.
I don't see why using Brave or whatever would influence the contents of their server logs.
If you clear your Google history (as you should), can they still respond to an order like this with your name? What if you did the search from Brave or Safari, where you were not logged into Google?