Our freedoms are absolutely eroding away. Many of them are actually gone and most of us don’t even realize it.

The federal government is now issuing warrants for Google to turn over information on individuals who search for certain things using their search engine.

I haven’t seen a list of what terms they are looking for, but I have ideas and if my ideas are right, it really doesn’t take much.

According to Yahoo,

In an attempt to track down criminals, federal investigators have started using new “keyword warrants” and used them to ask Google to provide them information on anyone who searched a victim’s name or their address during a particular year, an accidentally unsealed court document that Forbes found shows.

Google has to respond to thousands of warrant orders each year, but the keyword warrants are a relatively new strategy used by the government and are controversial.

“Trawling through Google’s search history database enables police to identify people merely based on what they might have been thinking about, for whatever reason, at some point in the past,” Jennifer Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Forbes.

“This never-before-possible technique threatens First Amendment interests and will inevitably sweep up innocent people, especially if the keyword terms are not unique and the time frame not precise. To make matters worse, police are currently doing this in secret, which insulates the practice from public debate and regulation,” she added.

Who are they labeling as criminals? In reality, it will be abused heavily and turn into a minority report situation where the government would “preemptively stop a crime” before it happens and they’ll cite the Google search as their evidence.

Searching and learning about something is not and should not be against the law, nor should it implicate anyone of a crime. However, I will say that coupled with an actual crime, it could be used as evidence to bolster a case I believe, but even then, I don’t think that the authorities should be able to subpoena Google for private information.

There is a way to help avoid this. You can use web browsers like Brave, alternative search engines like DuckDuckGo, and use VPNs to hide your location. There are of course other ways as well, but I won’t try getting into the complexity of using something like Tor, but it’s something to investigate as well.

It’s hard to hide nowadays, and it’s sad that we even have to hide when we’re not doing anything wrong.