Google’s concerns that turning over selected search data to government prosecutors would violate users’ privacy and expose its trade secrets are unfounded, the U.S. Justice Department said in a court filing Friday.
The brief was the DOJ’s response to Google refusal to comply with a government subpoena for a week’s worth of search keywords and URL results, which prosecutors hope will depict the availability of pornography on the Internet. The DOJ wants to reactivate the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, judged unconstitutional by an appellate court and the judgment upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 2004.
In responding to Google’s objections, the DOJ included a declaration by Philip Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, that the government request specifically asked Google to remove any personally identifying information from the search requests.
“The study does not involve examining the queries in more than a cursory way,” Stark wrote. “It involves running a random sample of the queries through the Google search engine and categorizing the results.”
MSN, AOL and Yahoo! all complied with some form of the DOJ request for data, and emphasized that the information they provided had been scrubbed of all personal characteristics.
With preliminary responses from both parties now filed, a hearing on compelling Google to comply with the DOJ subpoena is scheduled for March 13 in a California federal court.
