Google Records Subpoenaed

Having read this law, I think that it is ridiculous. It requires all websites that gather information to know that the infornatiuon they are obtaining is from a child, and then contact the parent of that child and request consent to use that information. Does OmniNerd know if it is being visited by minors? I doubt it.
P.S. Does it seem to anyone else that every new bill is turning into some kind of "Child Protection Act"?

This does seem a little foolish. First, the Act itself reeks of "bad law" – by imposing unrealistic standards ("obtain verifiable parental consent"), using vague terms ("actual knowledge that [a website] is collecting personal information from a child"), and being based on arbitrary definitions (a "child" is defined as under 13 … so 14-year-olds don’t need "protection?"), it virtually guarantees a challenge in court.

Second, the goverment’s request seems arbitrary as well. One million random web addresses? What, did somebody watch Austin Powers the night before writing the subpoena? What can you do with 1 million URLs that you can’t do with 500,000? Or 100,000? Or less? I would think the minimum number to be statistically significant would be much less than 1 million. That number sounds like something a congressional staffer came up with after a long night of drinking, or a number that was designed to sound good in a press release. And even better, all Google searches during a given week? How long would it take to "mine" that unbelievably huge amount of data (for example, to figure out how often porn sites showed up unintentionally as opposed to deliberately)?

The whole thing looks like a clumsy attemt to curry favor with voters who are concerned with their children’s online welfare … but are either unwilling or unable to provide the parental supervision necessary to ensure such a thing.

Google Records Subpoenaed_…this is all over the news. I heard it on the radio, saw it on CNN, read it on Omninerd…there are at least 900 news stories about it right now. However, it is just now being reportedBUSINESSPRO-GOOGLE-PRIVACY-DC.XML that the "Justice Department said on Friday that America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft had all complied with similar requests."

This adds an interesting dimension to the case. What does this say about Google? Or the other search engines?

There is a great deal of buzz in the news about Google not turning their search results over to the government. The government has only asked for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period. What information could Google provide if asked for more? According to their privacy policy Google records the following information in their server logs:

Here is an example of a typical log entry where the search is for "cars", followed by a breakdown of its parts:

123.45.67.89 – 25/Mar/2003 10:15:32 – http://www.google.com/search?q=cars – Firefox 1.0.7; Windows NT 5.1 – 740674ce2123e969

• *123.45.67.89 is the Internet Protocol address assigned to the user by the user’s ISP; depending on the user’s service, a different address may be assigned to the user by their service provider each time they connect to the Internet;
• *25/Mar/2003 10:15:32 is the date and time of the query;
• *http://www.google.com/search?q=cars is the requested URL, including the search query;
• *Firefox 1.0.7; Windows NT 5.1 is the browser and operating system being used; and
• *740674ce2123a969 is the unique cookie ID assigned to this particular computer the first time it visited Google. (Cookies can be deleted by users. If the user has deleted the cookie from the computer since the last time s/he visited Google, then it will be the unique cookie ID assigned to the user the next time s/he visits Google from that particular computer).

Of course, if you use Gmail, Google’s Toolbar, or other tools you have elected to send much more information to Google. Tim Wu, a Columbia Law School professor, has an interesting article about how the only way to keep private information private is for Google not to store it at all. He argues that Google should delete information such as IP’s and limit how long information is stored. Here are some of his comments:

Imagine we were to find out one day that Starbucks had been recording everyone’s conversations for the purpose of figuring out whether cappuccino is more popular than macchiato. Sure, the result, on the margin, might be a better coffee product. And, yes, we all know, or should, that our conversations at Starbucks aren’t truly private. But we’d prefer a coffee shop that wasn’t listening—and especially one that won’t later be able to identify the macchiato lovers by name. We need to start to think about search engines the same way and demand the same freedoms.

It all goes back to this basic point: How free you are corresponds exactly to how free you think you are. And Americans today feel great freedom to tell their deepest secrets; secrets they won’t share with their spouses or priests, to their computers. The Luddites were right—our closest confidants today are robots. People have a place to find basic anonymous information on things like sexually transmitted diseases, depression, or drug addiction. The ability to look in secret for another job is not merely liberating, it’s economically efficient. But all this depends on our feeling free to search without being watched.
bq. Recent events suggest that relying on the present administration to protect such basic freedoms may be, shall we say, unpromising. Other governments are just as bad if not worse. That’s why the public’s demand must be of Google—not the state. It should be that Google please stop keeping quite so much information attached to our IP addresses; please modify logging practices so that all identifying information is stripped. And please run history’s greatest "search and delete," right now, and take out the IP addresses from every file that contains everyone’s last five years of searches.

What do you think?

Two months ago, as reported in this post, the government asked Google to turn over "1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period." A federal judge has ruled that Google does not need to turn over any search terms and will only have to turn over 50,000 URL’s. Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel for Google had this to say in the Google Blog:

This is a clear victory for our users and for our company, and Judge Ware’s decision regarding search queries is especially important. While privacy was not the most significant legal issue in this case (because the government wasn’t asking for personally identifiable information), privacy was perhaps the most significant to our users. As we noted in our briefing to the court, we believe that if the government was permitted to require Google to hand over search queries, that could have undermined confidence that our users have in our ability to keep their information private.

The victory is especially sweet for Google because it distinguished themselves from Yahoo and Microsoft who turned over the requested information to the government without a fight.