Google's Response to the DoJ Motion

neoviky writes "Google Inc. on Friday formally rejected the U.S. Justice Department's subpoena of data from the Web search leader, arguing the demand violated the privacy of users' Web searches and its own trade secrets. Responding to a motion by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Google also said in a filing in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California the government demand to disclose Web search data was impractical."

Comments

Laughable

[fafaforza]

Or am I just cynikal?

From what I understand, the government asked for web search strings alone. No identifying information at all.

Google claims to be fighting the good fight of protecting their users' data, but how different is the data that the government wants, from the data the Google itself uses to comprise the various lists of most popular searches, the 'popular topics' are in news.google.com, etc? I'm not sure that I'd like my search to be part of such a public display. Is Google's users' data being user improperly in that case, too?

The way I see it is that Google is simply grandstanding. There have been some voices recently that Google has been getting too powerfull and encompassing. They have your email, they know what you search for, and they search your entire hard drive and call back home with their toolbar.

From what I understand, the government asked them for similar search data, with no identifying information, for their own statystical analysis. Is this Google's chance to get back to the good graces of the Internet's geeks, stick to their missions to "do no evil" and retain their image of the anti-corporation, the underdog, and the rebel, while trying to get back to their $150 billion market cap?

Completely different

[typical]

But there is a difference.

With the RIAA, a crime had been committed, and Yahoo was asking to not turn over information identifying the offenders (more or less, yes, this is simplified).

In this case, the government has *no* committed crime, and is not trying to track down any criminals. They are simply trying (or at least, this is their justification) to obtain Google's search data to support GOP initiatives to spread pornography filters based on the fact that N% of searches return pornography hits.

My take is that Google is completely in the right. The federal government has absolutely no right to that data, nor do I want them to be able to subpoena it.

As for not being identifiable, give me a break. You surf sites with ads served by people like Doubleclick and Google Ads. Google can match all past searches from your IP or from a machine with any cookies that they've set on your machine. This is not speculation -- they have specifically stated that they have this ability. It's a pretty good bet that a number of sites on the Web have your real name. Maybe it's not a drop-in "Google has a complete database", but it only takes Google + *one* other website you visit that has your personal name, and there's a damned comprehensive list of your thoughts, research, summary of what you're reading about and so forth available to the federal government.

I don't think that this is a very good thing.