There really is a first here, they not only failed to notify the user but also handed over data they weren't legally obligated to.

I incline myself to be more annoyed at the problem than the folks reporting that the problem still exists.

Yes.

Google publicly promises not to do exactly what they did here. Why would this not be a story?

Where does Google publicly promise they don't do this?

For example, there's https://policies.google.com/terms/information-requests?hl=en...

"""When we receive a request from a government agency, we send an email to the user account before disclosing information. If the account is managed by an organization, we’ll give notice to the account administrator.

We won’t give notice when legally prohibited under the terms of the request. We’ll provide notice after a legal prohibition is lifted, such as when a statutory or court-ordered gag period has expired.

We might not give notice if the account has been disabled or hijacked. And we might not give notice in the case of emergencies, such as threats to a child’s safety or threats to someone’s life, in which case we’ll provide notice if we learn that the emergency has passed."""

Agree. Google can't go against the all-mighty state. Just look at what Anthropic did and the effect of that action. There are billions of dollars at stake on government contracts that they can't afford to lose. Reminds me of Mullvad's ad https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fPzvUW8qaWY

Google is a multi-trillion dollar company that brings in $50b+ a year from Youtube alone, its government contracts are a pittance and it could absolutely do without them. There is no defense for complying in advance with a wannabe-fascist regime, especially when said regime is operating illegally.

I completely agree. But this argument would be incomprehensible to the class of people who own Google and similar corporations.

The whole notion that Google (or Apple or anyone else) should ignore and flaunt the state is insane by itself.

I don't want megacorps to ignore our EU laws just like I don't want them to ignore US laws. They're not people, they don't get the right to disobedience.

It is the US administration that is flaunting the law, not Google. Nobody is actually asking Google to break the law, they are in fact asking it to follow the law by not complying with illegal requests.

Which requests in this case were illegal? And isn't legality established by the person suing the government in this case and not megacorp playing the lawyer?

ICE's use of "administrative subpoenas" and other executive tactics are in violation of the 4th Amendment of the Constitution. To operate legally, their request would need to be approved by a judge. That's not even a high bar, given the judiciary rubber-stamps the vast majority of warrants, but they can't even be bothered with that. The article points out that Google used to notify users of exactly this kind of request specifically so that the victim of the crime had time to challenge the subpoena in court, where it would be tossed out without giving away their private information, but now people are no longer being given a chance to defend themselves from abuse by Google's complicity.