Brian Walshe’s grisly Google search history following the disappearance of his wife Ana now forms the basis of a murder trial – despite her body not being found.
The cache of data, including searches for ‘how long before you can inherit’, were stored by the Silicon Valley giant – as they are with all users, even if they believe they have wiped their personal devices of any trace.
Walshe, 47, who is accused of murdering Ana in the basement of their home in Cohasset, Massachusetts, used his son’s iPad to search for: ’10 ways to dismember a body’ and ‘does baking soda make a body smell good?’
Not only does Google retain this information – but law enforcement can compel tech companies to turn over the data with warrants.
This goes a step further with controversial ‘keyword searches’ where the process operates in reverse – authorities can request Google find users who have made incriminating searches so they can hone in on suspects.
Brian Walshe pleaded not guilty to beating his wife Ana to death this morning as prosecutors laid out a mountain of evidence against him including Google searches about divorce, murder, dismemberment and decomposing bodies
Google has come under pressure from internet privacy campaigners and in 2020 the tech giant’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced an auto-delete feature to purge the stored search and location data after 18 months.
Previously the information was stored by the firm indefinitely.
The feature was applied as the default setting across all new Google accounts – however, it had to be activated by existing users.
Despite these protections, law enforcement can compel tech giants like Google to release searches – and they can use keyword warrants which alert the authorities if specific search terms are being used.
Keyword warrants, as well as geofence warrants where police can ask Google to hand over data for people in a particular area, are particularly controversial over fears that the ‘dragnet measure’ provides the authorities with disproportionate power.
Critics argue that the warrants put innocent people at risk of arrest – as in the case of a Florida man who was embroiled in a 2019 burglary probe after riding his bike past the scene.
The practice was revealed in the arson case of Michael Williams – an associate of the convicted sex offender R. Kelly – who torched the car of an accuser in Florida in July 2020.
Investigators sent a keyword warrant to Google that requested data on ‘users who had searched the address of the residence close in time to the arson.’
Google provided IP addresses – a unique identifier used by internet service providers – of people who searched for the victims’ home address.
The data was tied to a phone used by Williams, allowing police to pinpoint his device to a location near the site of the arson during the crime.
Further raids of his Google searches showed Williams had looked up ignition of fertilizer and diesel fuel, witness intimidation and witness tampering, and countries that do not have extradition agreements with the US.
Williams was hit with an eight-year prison sentence in November 2021 for the attack on an SUV outside the home of one of the singer’s accusers.
Keyword warrants are now the subject of a constitutional challenge – the first of its kind – after police tracked suspects down after five people were killed in an arson attack in Colorado in 2020.
When the police failed to turn up any leads, they served Google with a warrant for anyone who searched the address of the fire.
The tech giant complied, helping the authorities track down three teenagers who had searched the address. They were later charged with murder.
Defense lawyers filed a motion last Wednesday to challenge the judge’s decision to use evidence from the warrant, calling the reverse keyword search warrants ‘a digital dragnet of immense proportions.’
They are asking the Colorado Supreme Court to review the case, after the judge earlier denied their motion to suppress the evidence.
The keyword search warrant ‘is profoundly different from traditional search warrants seeking data belonging to a suspect,’ the lawyers argued in the court filing. ‘Instead, the process operates in reverse – search everyone first, and identify suspects later.’
The defense argue that Google must search through billions of users to respond to keyword searches.
The practice has come under increased scrutiny following the US Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade.
Campaigners fear that keyword searches and location data could be used to prosecute women who obtain abortions in states where it is legal.
Google boss Sundar Pichai announced in 2020 an auto-delete feature to purge the stored search and location data after 18 months. The feature was applied as the default setting across all new Google accounts – however, it had to be activated by existing users.
Privacy advocates say such broad warrants inherently sweep up innocent people.
Geofence data ensnared a man who seemed to be at the site of a 2018 killing in Avondale, Arizona.
Jorge Molina spent six days in jail before his lawyer provided police with evidence exonerating him.
His mother’s ex-boyfriend was later arrested in the killing. It turns out Molina had given the man his old cellphone, which was still logged in to his Google account.
‘Police are basically treating this like it’s DNA or fingerprint evidence, but it’s not,’ said Jack Litwak, Molina’s attorney. ‘Jorge was nowhere near there and then he was accused of the worst crime you can be accused of committing.’
Prosecutors say they tailor geofence warrants as narrowly as possible.
‘There is a process by which the 4th Amendment is followed and where people´s privacy concerns and considerations are at least weighed against the public safety interest and the strong governmental investigation interest,’ said Lorrin Freeman, the district attorney in Wake County, North Carolina.
Prosecutors consider Google ‘a witness to the robbery’ in Chatrie’s case, and argue he had no reasonable expectation of privacy since he voluntarily opted in to Google’s Location History.
Privacy advocates say many cellphone users don’t understand how much their movements are being tracked, nor how to opt out.
A 2018 Associated Press investigation found that many Google applications store data even when owners used a privacy setting it said would prevent that.
Google later added new privacy controls that allow users to put an expiration date on their data and recently said it will automatically delete location history for new users after 18 months.
‘The question of how we would want to govern this novel and extremely comprehensive capability is really something that’s up in the air,’ said Jennifer Stisa Granick, surveillance and cybersecurity counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. ‘We just now as a society are just starting to deal with technology like this.’
