Google has refused to hand over one million random web addresses and records of all Google searches for a 1 week period. Google, AOL, MSN and Yahoo all received requests from the Department Of Justice. It appears that only Google refused to comply. Now the DOJ has moved a motion a motion to force Google to do as ordered.
The US government apparently wants to find out how much pornography shows up in the searches that children do.
In India, the government is trying to force a ban on smoking in movies. They are not willing to ban cigarette factories though. We have witnessed similar things with the patently paranoid Bush Government. They don’t want to act tough against Child pornography. They want to show how much porn kids access through searches (as if that is a solution) Then, they will make some kind of anti-porn/child or something lese kind of law.
Danny Sullivan has some brilliant suggestions for the government:
1.
If you want to measure how much porn is showing up in searches, try searching for it yourself rather than issuing privacy alarm sounding subpoenas. It would certainly be more accurate.
2.
Do you know every variation of a term someone might use, that you’re going to dig out of the hundreds of millions of searches you’d get?
3.
Far better would be to do some searches that you think children and teens are actually doing, such as by doing a survey of them. Then just go start searching on Google and the other search engines yourselves. See what actually comes up, especially when the filtering protection each service offers is enabled. That would give you plenty of data, plus it would be useful for everyone to have someone rigorously test the filtering systems that are offered. Serving subpoenas to get the data isn’t necessary.
I suggest you also check out SearchEngineWatch’s new thread on A Search Privacy Bill Of Rights.
The Bush Administration is already facing impeachment threats over the wire-tapping incidents. With this move, they have succeeded in passing on the disease of paranoia to the US citizens.
Kudos to Google. It could easily have given the Feds a list of completely unassociated searches with IP addresses, times, cookies and registration information.
Comments
Danny Sullivan really seems to cuddle up to Google, like does he work for Google or something, or getting free ad words? He is no where near objective- but worry not, he is ”not evil” How can he defend a company that got away with only $90 Million Dollars in Click Fraud:) Yes, Good Guys:) It’s like Bob Dylan said, ” Steal a little and they throw you in jail, Steal a lot and they make you king.”