The Colorado Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of a keyword warrant, a digital dragnet tool that allows law enforcement to identify everyone who searched the internet for a specific term or phrase.
The investigation that led to the People v. Seymour case focused on a tragic house fire. The police were able to persuade Google to reveal the identities of anyone who had searched for a different version of the house's street address in the two weeks leading up to the arson by using a keyword warrant. This allowed the police to determine who was responsible for the arson. In order to fulfill the requirements of a keyword warrant, a service provider is required to look through the data of all of its customers, in this case, all one billion of Google's users' search queries.
The essential idea of keyword warrants is that it is virtually impossible to make efficient use of the Internet in this day and age without making use of a search engine such as Google. This is the case in the present day. There is almost nothing about a user's life, from the most little to the most significant, that will not be reflected in their search words over the course of months and years. This is true even for the most mundane aspects of their existence. The majority of the court, consisting of four justices, reached a consensus that customers had an interest in both free speech and privacy about their search queries and the results of those searches. However, the court's analysis was both shallow and, in other places, completely off track.
Due to the presence of the "third party" notion, the court in Colorado came to the conclusion that the privacy of search query information is protected by the Colorado constitution but is not protected by the Fourth Amendment. However, some courts have reasoned that the questions themselves are comparable to the location data that was upheld as confidential in Carpenter v. United States. This case was decided in 2014. The constitutionality of Google's initial search of all of its users' search queries was not called into question by the court since it came to the conclusion that the things that were taken (users' search queries and IP addresses) were adequately limited.
