A U.S. Federal Judge said on March 14 that he is inclined to allow the government to see snippets of Google users’ search habits.
The Bush administration will renew its effort to find out what people have been looking for on Google Inc.’s Internet-leading search engine, continuing a legal showdown over how much of the Web’s vast databases should be shared with the government.
The U.S. District judge James Ware said he will "very quickly" decide the exact nature of what Google has to turn over. Ware was commenting at the end of a courtroom proceeding here between the market-leading search engine and the Bush administration.
It will mark the first time the Justice Department and Google have sparred in court since the government subpoenaed the Mountain-View, Calif.-based company last summer in an effort to obtain a long list of search requests and Web site addresses.
Despite government assurances to the contrary, the case has touched a nerve with consumers and businesses, because Internet searches often reveal private information and trade secrets.
"This is not part of a dragnet," argued Joel McElvain, of the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington D.C. "We will not share this information."
Ware’s decision is still being drafted; through his comments during a court hearing here, he seems inclined to force Google to give the government at least something.
That can be seen as handing the Bush administration a partial victory, although it had originally asked for billions of Web sites, and millions of key words.
The government believes the requested information will help bolster its arguments in another case in Pennsylvania, where the Bush administration hopes to revive a law designed to make it more difficult for children to see online pornography.
Google has refused to cooperate, maintaining that the government’s demand threatens its users’ privacy as well as its own closely guarded trade secrets.
The Justice Department has downplayed Google’s concerns, arguing it does not want any personal information neither any data that would undermine the company’s thriving business.
Although the Justice Department says it does not want any personal information now, a victory over Google in the case would likely encourage far more invasive requests in the future, said University of Connecticut law professor Paul Schiff Berman, who specializes in Internet law.
The DOJ was once seeking two months of search terms, plus billions of indexed Web pages, but backed down after worldwide attention was drawn to the case. Now the DOJ is asking Google to provide a random sample of about 50,000 of the Web sites it makes available in search results, plus 5,000 keywords that Google users have entered.
When asked to evaluate Ware’s comments, Google’s lead attorney Albert Gidari said, "We did not lose. We took them down from billions to thousands." This is in reference to the government’s original request to see two months’ worth of search terms, plus billions of Web sites Google has indexed.
Of that data, the DOJ intends to only actually use less than a fifth of what has turned over for its stated purposes, according to Gidari.
Cooperating with the government "is a slippery slope and it is a path we should not go down," Google co-founder Sergey Brin told industry analysts earlier this month.
Just what Google is likely to soon provide remains unclear, though Ware strongly indicated Google will have to turn over a random sampling of a few thousand Web addresses that it has indexed.
The case has focused attention on just how much personal information is stored by popular Web sites like Google – and the potential for that data to attract the interest of the government and other parties.
"The erosion of privacy tends to happen incrementally," Berman said. "While no one intrusion may seem that big, over the course of the next decade or two, you might end up in a place as a society where you never thought you would be."
Google seized on the case to underscore its commitment to privacy rights and differentiate itself from the Internet’s other major search engines – Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s MSN and Time Warner Inc.’s America Online. All three say they complied with the Justice Department’s request without revealing their users’ personal information.
Even as it defies the Bush administration, Google recently bowed to the demands of China’s Communist government by agreeing to censor its search results in that country so it would have better access to the world’s fastest growing Internet market. Google’s China capitulation has been harshly criticized by some of the same people cheering the company’s resistance to the Justice Department subpoena.
While the demand has significantly decreased, Gidari argued there is still legitimate concerns regarding safeguarding Google customer’s privacy and, to a much lesser degree, revealing Google’s trade secrets.
"If you were one of the 1,000 people involved in this process, you would not be happy," Gidari told the judge.
Legal experts handicapping the case say that if the Department of Justice did force Google to turn over the data, it would serve to whet the Bush administration’s appetite for more of the same.
The government believes the test will show how easily it is to get around the filtering software that is supposed to prevent children from seeing sexually explicit material on the Web.