| On March 17, a federal district judge in California issued an order limiting the Justice Department’s demand for records from Google. While Google must still turn over a list of 50,000 web addresses, it will not have to reveal any Internet search terms submitted by users.
The government’s demands had been significantly narrowed compared, to the subpoena filed last August. That subpoena asked for the addresses of all web sites indexed by Google, as well as every search term entered into Google during a two-month period in 2005. Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL, were also asked to provide records. Of the companies, Google alone objected, claiming that the demand threatened Google’s trade secrets and its image as a protector of users’ privacy.
In making the decision, Judge Ware of the Northern District of California recognized that the demand affected not just Google, but also the privacy rights of individual Google users. Not only do users want the terms they search for to be private, search terms alone can sometimes reveal a user’s identity, such as when people search for their social security numbers or credit card numbers to see if that information is available on the Internet. The judge also noted that the government might, in looking through search terms, decide to follow up on information for unauthorized purposes, quoting a Justice Department spokesperson who said that “if something raised alarms, we would hand it over·”
Because of these concerns, the judge ruled that Google did not have to turn over search terms, but that the list of web addresses, since they did not impact privacy, had to be turned over.
The Justice Department is seeking the records to conduct a statistical study for the defense of the Child Online Protection Act, an online censorship law that was blocked as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2004. The government has given few details as to how it intends to use the information — an omission that the judge called “particularly striking,” considering the time the government had to prepare the case, and given that it already had essentially the same information from the other major search engines.
The Child Online Protection Act makes it a criminal offense for anyone to post adult material on the web, unless they first collect information from users proving that the user is not a minor. The Supreme Court barred enforcement of the law, saying that the government had not proven that this restriction on free speech was the most effective means to prevent minors from viewing adult material on the Internet. |
