Police sweep Google searches to find suspects. The tactic is facing its first legal challenge.

Privacy advocates are concerned that police could use reverse keyword searches to investigate people who seek information about abortions.

A teen charged with setting a fire that killed five members of a Senegalese immigrant family in Denver, Colorado, has become the first person to challenge police use of Google search histories to find someone who might have committed a crime, according to his lawyers.  

The pushback against this surveillance tool, known as a reverse keyword search, is being closely watched by privacy and abortion rights advocates, who are concerned that it could soon be used to investigate women who search for information about obtaining an abortion in states where the procedure is now illegal.

In documents filed Thursday in Denver District Court, lawyers for the 17-year-old argue that the police violated the Constitution when they got a judge to order Google to check its vast database of internet searches for users who typed in the address of a home before it was set ablaze on Aug. 5, 2020. Three adults and two children died in the fire.

That search of Google’s records helped point investigators to the teen and two friends, who were eventually charged in the deadly fire, according to police records. All were juveniles at the time of their arrests. Two of them, including the 17-year-old, are being tried as adults; they both pleaded not guilty. The defendant in juvenile court has not yet entered a plea.

The 17-year-old’s lawyers say the search, and all evidence that came from it, should be thrown out because it amounted to a blind expedition through billions of Google users’ queries based on a hunch that the killer typed the address into a search bar. That, the lawyers argued, violated the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/police-google-reverse-keyword-searches-rcna35749

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