> A group of private investigators hired by Dateline NBC located McDermott when they noticed a centralized cluster of IP addresses originating near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, all clicking onto a site dedicated to tracing his whereabouts.
I.e. do google yourself; just don't click on the results. Pull the content from Google's cache, or go through an anonymizer.
Of course it does! But note that in the above case, the investigators didn't have to get anything from Google (and Google wouldn't just hand over that info to a bunch of insurance investigators).
They got the IP addresses from their own site dedicated to that case, which was getting hits from someone searching precisely for that.
And, by the way, Google could figure out who you are even if you don't search for yourself, but only search for the same kind of stuff you've always been searching for. Someone faking their death is screwed here. Just like "content ID" can determine the identity of audio work even if it has been disguised, Google can match the activity pattern of user X to some existing pattern of user Y, potentially revealing that X = Y.
> ...
> A group of private investigators hired by Dateline NBC located McDermott when they noticed a centralized cluster of IP addresses originating near Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, all clicking onto a site dedicated to tracing his whereabouts.
I.e. do google yourself; just don't click on the results. Pull the content from Google's cache, or go through an anonymizer.