Both examples should be equally unacceptable. When you're asking for "a list of all people who X" it's a fishing expedition not a targeted investigation of a few suspects. It doesn't matter how many rows the SELECT returns.

I cannot honestly see how you say that

Giving a list of a small number of people who bought a hat, limited by location and time

and

Giving full video footage of everyones wardrobes (!!)

Are equally unacceptable. Unacceptable, sure, that's a difference of opinion but full video footage of everyones wardrobes is not the same as a small list of names.

Perhaps a similar thing would be if there was a well-executed break-in somewhere, would it be reasonable to ask for a list of people who took out the plans to that building from the local planning office recently?

> When you're asking for "a list of all people who X" it's a fishing expedition not a targeted investigation of a few suspects.

By this logic, any CCTV footage should also be thrown out because it's "a list of all people who were in location X at time Y".

I propose further bending the analogy to make it more correct:

>a particular and rare style should be "a particular style", since we don't know how prevalent the image is in places that aren't major image search engines, or for other search terms within those engines.

>from a particular designer store should be "from a specific location of a particular global discount store"

>on the day someone was seen committing a crime while wearing an obviously brand new one. on the Tuesday before someone was seen committing a crime while wearing one. (images, once acquired, last forever; there's nothing saying the image was acquired in the time window of the subpoena)

I'm not sure I understand your changes. We're talking about searching for a relatively unknown person, so I'd assume we're talking about a rare search term. This is not like asking for who searched about "wire fraud".

> >from a particular designer store should be "from a specific location of a particular global discount store"

Sure, fair enough, my point was simply that it was a rare thing and pretty identifiable.

> (images, once acquired, last forever; there's nothing saying the image was acquired in the time window of the subpoena)

I'm sorry, I don't understand this sentence.