Google Promised to Warn Users Before Giving Data to Cops and Then Didn't

Key Takeaways

• In May 2025, Google handed Amandla Thomas-Johnson's account data to ICE without the advance warning it had publicly promised for nearly a decade.
• Thomas-Johnson, a PhD student on a student visa, had briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest at Cornell University in September 2024 before going into hiding for three months as federal agents came looking for him.
• The subpoena requested subscriber data, including name, address, IP addresses, and session times, enough to reconstruct location, communication patterns, and social connections.
• Google's outside counsel later acknowledged this is a systematic practice, not an isolated mistake, calling it "simultaneous notice."
• The Electronic Frontier Foundation has filed complaints with the California and New York attorneys general urging investigations into Google for deceptive trade practices.

A Ph.D. Candidate, a Protest, and a Subpoena

In September 2024, Amandla Thomas-Johnson attended a pro-Palestinian protest at Cornell University for all of five minutes. What followed was three months in hiding. Federal agents showed up at his home, and a friend was detained at Tampa airport and interrogated about his whereabouts. Yet, Thomas-Johnson, a British and Trinidad and Tobago dual citizen studying in the US on a student visa, had not been accused of any crime.

He eventually left the country, crossing into Canada at Niagara Falls, believing he had cleared the reach of US authorities. Weeks later, in Geneva, an email from Google arrived, informing him that the company had already handed his account data to the Department of Homeland Security. There was no advance warning, no opportunity to contest it, only a notification that it was done.

A colleague of his, Momodou Taal, had received advance notice of similar subpoenas and successfully challenged them, with ICE ultimately withdrawing those requests. Thomas-Johnson never got that chance, and the pattern behind that difference is now the subject of targeting academics and researchers who fall into ICE's sights.

The Fine Print Google Forgot to Mention

Google's own terms clearly state that when the company receives a request from a government agency, it sends an email to the user account before disclosing information. That promise has been on the books for nearly a decade. ICE sent its subpoena in April 2025. Google had over a month to notify Thomas-Johnson before acting.

On May 8, 2025, Google complied with the subpoena and sent Thomas-Johnson notice the same day. The data was already gone. The subpoena itself requested subscriber information, specifically his name, physical address, IP addresses, and session times and durations.

None of that sounds dramatic in isolation, but taken together those fragments form a detailed surveillance profile. IP logs approximate location. Physical addresses show where someone sleeps. Session times map when they were communicating and with whom. No message content required.

Simultaneous Notice Is Not Notice

After EFF took up Thomas-Johnson's case, communications with Google revealed that what happened to him was not a one-off error. When a government agency imposes what Google's outside counsel described as an "artificial deadline," the company sometimes complies with the request and notifies the user on the same day. Google calls this "simultaneous notice." That label deserves some scrutiny, because notifying someone after their data has already left the building is not notice in any meaningful sense. At best, it could be called a courtesy email, nothing more.

On April 14, 2026, EFF filed complaints with the California and New York attorneys general asking them to investigate Google for deceptive trade practices, seek financial restitution, and hold the company to its public commitment.

The core argument is simple: a promise to warn users before complying with government demands, systematically bypassed the moment a deadline appears, is a default setting that gets switched off whenever the government asks firmly enough, not a promise. That is precisely the environment where ICE's surveillance methods are most dangerous and exactly where the warning matters most.

Google has the legal infrastructure, the resources, and nearly a decade of public commitment behind this policy, and their "simultaneous notice" is hardly any kind of technical constraint. If that promise evaporates the moment a government agency applies deadline pressure, it was never really a promise to begin with.

So here is the question Google still owes an answer to, the one EFF senior staff attorney F. Mario Trujillo put directly. How many other times has it done this? Because Thomas-Johnson is unlikely to be the only one who received that email after the fact, wondering what exactly they are now marked as and who still has copies.