My guess: they want to make the case that illegitimate use cases are indeed the primary use case. Their approach is to randomly sample all users and show that the vast majority use it to defeat emissions, undermining the app maker’s defence.

I don’t think that justifies the overreach. As you said, if they don’t have a case already, they shouldn’t be allowed to violate user privacy on speculation that some statistical evidence might hypothetically fall out of the data. But the legal system may disagree.

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bluefirebrand 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I suspect there is a bit of parallel construction going on

They might already know for a fact that illegitimate use cases are the primary use case, they just cannot use any of their evidence in court

So they are seeking a way to legally obtain the information they already have, basically

It's shady but my understanding is it happens kind of a lot in modern policing. They can get illegal information much easier than legal information. So the illegal information sort of forms the justification for the time and money spent pursuing and gathering the same information legally

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esseph 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I wonder if they will use this case (depending on how it turns out), for a case against 3d printers.

"You knowingly enabled $XYZ", etc.

Or AI companies, for that matter...

	▲	tencentshill 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		The supreme court struck that down for the Sony case. It was determined that since ISPs do not offer a service that is used specifically to break the law, they are not liable when their customers do. It would be the same argument here. the app is literally just an ODB tool, like many others on the market.