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The court orders show the government telling Google to provide the names, addresses, telephone numbers and user activity for all Google account users who accessed the YouTube videos between January 1 and January 8, 2023. The government also wanted the IP addresses of non-Google account owners who viewed the videos.

“This is the latest chapter in a disturbing trend where we see government agencies increasingly transforming search warrants into digital dragnets. It’s unconstitutional, it’s terrifying and it’s happening every day,” said Albert Fox-Cahn, executive director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project. “No one should fear a knock at the door from police simply because of what the YouTube algorithm serves up. I’m horrified that the courts are allowing this.” He said the orders were “just as chilling” as geofence warrants, where Google has been ordered to provide data on all users in the vicinity of a crime.

  • @shortwavesurfer@monero.town
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    833 months ago

    I dont think newpipe would protect from this since it still contacts the yt servers to pull the video. Peertube or a VPN would stop this though.

    • @balancedchaos@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I just found out that Lemmy is not allowing (or has rate-limited, or whatever) VPN connections to post or react.

      Not a fan of that at all.

      Edit: it’s my instance being on Cloudflare, not Lemmy as a whole. My mistake.

    • @einfach_orangensaft@feddit.de
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      93 months ago

      VPNs protect your from geting caught torrenting, but it cant protect you from the US-goverment.

      First of all most of the advertized VPN’s are Honeypots and/or back/bugdoored by the NSA.

      And even if they where not…so much of the internet runs on servers/services/isp’s that are related to american companys that Timing attacks are possibe (for example your ISP logs and shared your encrypted traffic and the NSA then compares Timing patterns of requests with other services).