sneaky

With the aim of identifying criminal suspects, U.S. police departments are increasingly relying on a controversial surveillance practice to demand large amounts of users’ data from tech companies. So-called “reverse” searches allow law enforcement and federal agencies to force big tech companies, like Google, to turn over information from their vast stores of user data. Reverse searches effectively cast a digital dragnet over a tech company’s store of user data to catch the information that police are looking for. Microsoft, Snap, Uber and Yahoo (which owns TechCrunch) have all received reverse orders for user data. Some companies choose not to store user data and others scramble the data so it can’t be accessed by anyone other than the user.