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Of course, judges can be easily faked too. How do you know it’s the real judge on the phone?

I guess you could always send someone to the courthouse in person, but that seems prohibitively expensive.

And anyway, how much money can we expect e.g. Google to spend verifying court orders targeting users on free plans?



> how much money can we expect e.g. Google to spend verifying court orders targeting users on free plans?

You don't pay money to enter Walmart but they are required to spend as much money as it takes to ensure you don't die in a fire while giving them zero dollars. Likewise food safety standards required by law aren't a sliding scale based on income. The relevant factor isn't how much money you made off the mark its how much harm your behavior can cause to that person.

If you put yourself in possession where your failure causes them greater harm you bought yourself a potentially expensive obligation that you wouldn't have for example if you just served search engine results based on search query or ads served without knowing the persons life story and the contents of their diary since the 3rd grade.

The actual answer is however much it takes to do a reasonable job or we ought to just fine you so much per screw up that you are forced to go sell shoes instead of search engine results.

The government can and should help make this procedure reasonable as it is 99% of the problem. Such orders ought to be cryptographic signed by hardware tokens that are physically in the judges possession on a device that isn't online THEN emailed to google. This relies purely on 1970s technology and probably should have been implemented about 20 years ago if we weren't collectively complete morons.

While this is implemented just coming from judges official government emails as opposed to their personal emails or a billion idiot cops would be substantially more secure.


> Of course, judges can be easily faked too.

Part of the problem is, because any cop can send an emergency request, in California there are 93,000 cop e-mail accounts, every one of which has to be protected from hacking.

By creating a bottleneck of, say, 10 judges per state who can issue emergency warrants (generously paid to staff a 24/7 rota) there are only 10 people whose e-mail accounts have to be kept 100% secure.


> And anyway, how much money can we expect e.g. Google to spend verifying court orders targeting users on free plans?

I dunno, how about all of it?

Maybe start with a few billion and then reevaluate how everyone feels about it.


What about small businesses then? Should they bankrupt themselves in these situations?


What if we taxed Google like we should and then use that money to properly fund out legal system and come up with solutions to the problem that you've pointed out?


How is this even vaguely relevant to this conversation?


If the two options are bankruptcy and shoddy review of fake law enforcement requests that hurts consumers I pick bankruptcy.

I bet those aren't the only two options though.




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