Last weekend, a federal judge ruled that the world’s largest search engine provider, Google, must provide the U.S. government with information about its users.
This case is seen as a prime example of the conflict between online user privacy and law enforcement’s demands for data protection.
Judge James Ware of the Northern District of California, in his ruling, required Google to provide the U.S. government with at least 50,000 web addresses from its search engine index.
Google should “consult” with the government to develop a method for selecting any URLs from the company’s indexed web addresses and provide these addresses to the government, while not disclosing any information about its proprietary web address database.
The government is also required to pay Google for the costs associated with obtaining the requested data. This data will be kept confidential in accordance with the court’s requirements.
Additionally, Judge James Ware rejected the Washington administration’s request to compel Google to provide the search queries made by users on its search service.
“This is truly a major victory for our users. The court’s demands have been significantly limited, and most importantly, we are no longer required to provide user search queries,” said Nicole Wong, Google’s attorney.
The History of the Subpoena…
Last January, the U.S. Department of Justice made a move to request the court to compel Google to provide indexed web data along with information about its users.
During a hearing on March 14, 2006, Judge Ware stated that he had considered the Justice Department’s request for Google to provide user information.
At the hearing, representatives from the Justice Department indicated that the government had decided to reduce the number of web addresses Google was required to provide to 50,000 and the number of user search queries to 5,000. In contrast, the original request from the previous year called for 1 million website addresses and statistics on all search queries made on the service within a designated week.
Google refused to comply with this request, arguing that it violated user privacy. Furthermore, providing this information would disclose their business secrets. However, the government contended that it was not interested in data that could identify users or their sensitive personal information.
Conversely, Google argued that this was part of the Justice Department’s effort to enforce and support the Children’s Online Protection Act (COPA), a law that has not received much support and is considered a challenge by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
According to the ACLU, COPA violates the First Amendment rights of free speech in the U.S. Constitution. This law will be debated in court this October. To gather more compelling evidence, the Justice Department has decided to compel search engine providers like Google, Yahoo, America Online, and MSN to provide search data. Other search companies have rejected this request, with Google still partially complying.
The U.S. government argues that it needs data from search engines to demonstrate the effectiveness of the Children’s Online Protection Act compared to content filtering software in combating the proliferation of “adult” content on the Internet.
The Pennsylvania District Court, the origin of the COPA lawsuit, ruled that the ACLU did not have the right to oppose the case. The appellate court upheld this ruling in 2000.
The case was then brought to the Federal Supreme Court, but the Supreme Court decided to send the case back to the Pennsylvania District Court, which continued to uphold its ruling.
HVD – Computerworld
