In a story broken by Howard Mintz in the San Jose Mercury News, we learned Thursday that the US Justice Department has demanded the search records of millions of Google users.
“‘This is exactly the kind of case that privacy advocates have long feared,’ said Ray Everett-Church, a South Bay privacy consultant. ‘The idea that these massive databases are being thrown open to anyone with a court document is the worst-case scenario. If they lose this fight, consumers will think twice about letting Google deep into their lives.’ ‘The government can’t even claim that it’s for national security,’ Everett-Church said. ‘They’re just using it to get the search engines to do their research for them in a way that compromises the civil liberties of other people.’”
The demand comes as a part of the government’s attempt to uphold the Child Online Protection Act. Google, the online search and advertising giant, has so far refused to comply with the subpoena first issued in August 2005. The bigger story is that three of Google’s competitors—America Online, Microsoft, and Yahoo—have complied with the demand, providing information about the search activities of their users.
The US Supreme Court, in 2004, blocked the enforcement of the online pornography law as overly broad. It’s ironic—or, maybe not—that the government would use overly broad subpoenas to try to revive a law that was struck down as being overly broad.
Search analyst and author John Battelle saw this coming more than a year ago.
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