Google has until Feb. 6 to respond to a government demand for a random sampling of its indexed Web pages and a week’s worth of search traffic, a U.S. District Court judge said Friday.
Assuming Google’s response arrives on deadline, U.S. Department of Justice attorneys will have until Feb. 13 to respond to the search engine company’s arguments against providing the requested data. The case will then move to a federal court in San Jose, CA, on Feb. 27.
Federal prosecutors want to build a case to reinstate the Child Online protection Act of 1999 as shield for protecting children from adult material on the Web. To support the argument that software filters are not sufficient, they have subpoenaed index and keyword data from the four largest search engines. Last week Google said it refused to comply with the DOJ demand; MSN, Yahoo! and AOL have all submitted some portion of the requested records.
Google has maintained that the DOJ request, for 1 million random Web pages and a random sample of keyword searches conducted over a one-week period, is “overreaching” and would compromise users’ confidential information and corporate trade secrets. The other three search engines said their compliance did not expose personally identifiable information about users.
Several congressional legislators have shown interest in investigating search engines’ data collection policies and the access government should have to those databases. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D, VT) made public a letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asking for clarification on the purpose of the data requests, how personal data would be safeguarded, and whether it planned any more such subpoenas in the future. And Rep. Ed Markey (D, MA) has said he will propose a bill to put a time limit on the storage of personally identifiable information by search engines such as Yahoo! and Google.
“Internet search engines provide an extraordinary service, but the preservation of that service does not rely on a bottomless, timeless database that can do great damage despite good intentions,” Markey said in a statement.
