Confirming earlier press reports, MSN Search said it did comply with a request from the U.S. Department of Justice for search terms and indexed Web pages that was similar to the one Google is fighting. But MSN said the data provided was less than government lawyers originally requested and could not be traced back to IP addresses or used to build profiles of seekers.
A Friday posting on the official MSN Search blog by Web search general manager Ken Moss said that the company received a subpoena from the Justice Department in the summer of 2005 for data from its search services.
Moss did not detail specifics of the request, but it is thought to have been similar to the Google request, which originally asked for “all URLs that are available to be located through a query on your company’s search engine as of July 31, 2005” and for all searches performs for the months of June and July 2005.
MSN worked with the Justice Department to “scope the request to something that would be consistent” with the principal that the privacy of MSN users “is non-negotiable and something worth fighting to protect”, Moss said.
“Specifically, we produced a random sample of pages from our index and some aggregated query logs that listed queries and how often they occurred,” he wrote. No personal data was divulged, and both parties agreed that the information in the case would remain confidential.
Moss said the data provided to the DOJ could reveal how frequently some query terms occurred but would not let recipients look up IP addresses to see what computers performed specific searches. They would also be unable to look for users who searched on both “term A” and “term B”.
“We tried to strike the right balance in a very sensitive matter,” he wrote, and invited the public to judge whether MSN succeeded.
U.S. attorneys are seeking search data to buttress their case that software filters do not effectively prevent minors from gaining access to adult content on the Web. The DOJ hopes to reinstate the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which would impose penalties on operators of Web sites with adult content if minors gain access to their sites. Appellate courts ruled that the law infringed free speech and stopped it from taking effect. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld that injunction in 2004 but indicated that it might revisit the issue if supplied with better data about the amount of adult material on the Internet and the utility of content-filtering software.
The Justice Department’s attempt to use the search industry to amass that data became known last Wednesday when it filed a request that a U.S. district court force Google to comply with a scaled-down subpoena for a random sample of one million indexed Web pages and the keywords searched on Google during a sample one-week period. Google publicized both the government request and its own refusal. A Google lawyer characterized the government request as “overreaching” and said it would expose company trade secrets and personally identifiable information about its users.
Subsequent reports revealed that the Justice Department made similar data requests to Yahoo!, MSN Search and AOL Search. AOL has said it turned over a list of “aggregate and anonymous search terms, and not results, from a roughly one-day period” in 2005. Yahoo! says it complied with a DOJ subpoena for an unspecified number of records, but added that no personal information was revealed. “We are rigorous defenders of our users’ privacy,” a Yahoo! spokesperson said. “In our opinion, this is not a privacy issue.”
Privacy watchdog groups have generally approved Google’s opposition to the Justice Department subpoena. The DOJ is “asking Google to do its dirty work and collect information about the Internet speech activities of Google users,” Electronic Freedom Foundation staff attorney Kurt Opsahl said in a statement. “Google is rightly concerned that many of the randomly selected search queries would contain personal information about Google users.”
