3) Do you feel Google was
supporting or obstructing justice in its refusal to give up private information
to its government? Why?
Google has refused to
comply with a Justice Department subpoena filed last year, which the agency
hopes to use to resurrect the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), which
the Supreme Court struck down in 2004.
The subpoena requested
that Google provide a random sample of 1 million Web addresses and “the text of
each search string entered into Google’s search engine over a one-week period
(absent any information identifying the person who entered such query),”
according to the motion filed Wednesday in San Jose, Calif., by Justice
Department lawyers..
“It’s a bit odd that the
government feels the need to conduct a fishing expedition with Google if it
wants to test the filtering technology,” said Sherwin Siy, staff counsel at the
Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, which joined the ACLU as a
plaintiff in the original case.
“Though the law may be
on the government’s side here, I can appreciate Google’s reluctance to turn
over this information, which, presumably, contains some sensitive personal
information pertaining to its customers, including e-mail addresses, without
any control over how it’s treated after the fact,” he said.
“They wouldn’t have to
fight if they didn’t keep this information in the first place,” he said.
Google said the
government requests would put an undue burden on the company. But the motion
offered to “compensate Google for its reasonable expenses,” and noted that
other companies did not report any compliance difficulties.
“We did not provide any
personal information in response to the Department of Justice’s subpoena,”
Yahoo spokeswoman Mary Osako wrote in an e-mail yesterday. “In our opinion,
this is not a privacy issue. We complied on a limited basis and did not provide
any personally identifiable information.”
Reference:
The Washington Times (2006)
Available at: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2006/jan/19/20060119-105801-2649r/?page=al
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