The main crux of the problem here is that the DHS has been granted a wide berth by congress to issue administrative subpoenas - i.e. not reviewed by a real judge and not directed at criminals. In "good" times this made investigations run smoothly. But the reality now is that ICE is doing wide dragnets to make arrests without any judicial oversight and often hostile to habeas corpus.

(Also, my understanding is that when banking is involved, it may also fall under the Banking Secrecy Act and Know Your Customer Rules - a whole other privacy nightmare.)

I know we instinctively want to frame this as a privacy problem, but the real problem we need congress to act on is abolishing these "shadow" justice systems that agencies have been able to set up.

I was in one of these published NSLs issued by FBI a few years ago. I was notified by Google after the nondisclosure period.

> The first email, sent on May 8 from Cornell International Services, stated that his immigration status had been terminated by the federal government. The second email, sent from Google on the same day, notified him that his personal email account had been subject to a subpoena by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on March 31.

https://www.cornellsun.com/article/2025/11/immigration-autho...

Basically he was a British national with a student visa who was going to be deported for pro-palestian activism (under Trumps executive order mandating immigration authorities to do so), so he self-deported. Other's mention in the thread it's not clear if Google handed over any information.

This suggests that Google aggregates derived information based on how a user uses Google (i.e. VPN info). The fact that derived info was also potentially passed along is particularly upsetting to me.

Aside from the fact that I don't think companies should be able to collect user data at all (if you disagree, I think there's a good chance you're at least a little bit fascist), this amounts to Google providing free surveillance services to the government.

If you squint, it's minority-report-esque: eventually Google will tell the govt who it thinks is likely to commit crimes based on how they interact with its AIs. Almost certainly coming to a society near you soon.

Haha nice one, these tech companies are willing to have a deal with devil to get those lucrative Gov contracts, and since it’s the the wild west now in the US, the only action users can do is abandoning all these tech companies and look for alternatives.

There is too much a focus on Trump here - one should focus on the whole criminal entity. The whole network. It is true that the fish starts to rot from the head (well, not quite, but it is a common saying), but in reality there are numerous parts that are rotting away.

IMO there has to be a re-distribution of both wealth and power; as well as influence.

He must have plenty of money.

Well, guess what? The U.S. also has their own Huawei. But, at least, they're "democratic" and follow "the rule of the law" (for whatever these words mean nowadays).

As for gmail, it joined my old yahoo mail as a dumping ground. If some site wants an email, they get my gmail address, which I never go to these days.

But how did google get this person's info ? Are they spying on their emails, or worse yet, are they scraping data for apps you installed on your android phone ?

In this case you should blame the game not the player.

So when are you going to stop using Google? (You won't will you?)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46407683

2026 will be the year I get to 0%.

edit: "directly using"

Sadly, it didn't start out like this.