However, Broader Privacy Concerns Remain
The Justice Department asked a federal court in San Jose,
California, Wednesday to force Google to turn over search
records for use as evidence in a case where the government is
defending the constitutionality of the Child Online
Protection Act (COPA). Google has refused to comply with a
subpoena for those records, based in part on its concern for
its users' privacy.
COPA is a federal law that requires those who publish
non-obscene, constitutionally protected sexual material
online to take difficult and expensive steps to prevent
access by minors, steps that would chill publishers of
sexual material as well as the adults who want to access
such material anonymously. EFF is one of the plaintiffs in
the First Amendment challenge to COPA.
The subpoena to Google currently asks for a random sampling
of one million URLs from Google's database of web sites on
the Internet. More importantly, the DOJ is also subpoenaing
the text of each search string entered into Google's search
engine over a one-week period, absent any information
identifying the people who entered the search terms.
"The government is overreaching here, asking Google to do
its dirty work and collect information about the Internet
speech activities of Google users," said EFF Staff Attorney
Kurt Opsahl. "Last month, the federal court rejected many
of the government's over broad discovery requests to its
opposing parties. Rather than learn its lesson, the DOJ
continues to push for overreaching discovery, this time
from a company that isn't even a party to the case."
Google has cited its concern for user privacy as a reason
for not complying with the subpoena, in addition to the
unreasonable burden that compliance would place on Google
and the proprietary nature of its query database. In
particular, Google is rightly concerned that many of the
randomly selected search queries would contain personal
information about Google users.
While EFF applauds Google for defending its users' privacy
in this case, the current controversy only highlights the
broader privacy problem: Google logs all of the searches
you make, and most if not all of those queries are
personally identifiable via cookies, IP addresses, and
Google account information.
"The only way Google can reasonably protect the privacy of
its users from such legal demands now and in the future is
to stop collecting so much information about its users,
delete information that it does collect as soon as
possible, and take real steps to minimize how much of the
information it collects is traceable back to individual
Google users," said EFF Staff Attorney Kevin Bankston. "If
Google continues to gather and keep so much information
about its users, government and private attorneys will
continue to try and get it."
Importantly, users can also take steps to protect their
privacy from Google, the government, and others, by using
anonymizing technologies such as Tor when surfing the web.
Tor helps hide your IP address from Google so that even if
the lawyers come knocking, Google cannot identify you by
your searches.
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