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Google's battle with government over search data raises questions

By Megan Bakker
The Collegian

I KNOW ON ST. Patrick’s Day everyone had fun and got drunk and let loose. But if you got a little crazy with your Google searching, the federal government may soon find out.

Oops.

Last Friday, a federal judge ruled that Google needed to turn over 50,000 URLs from its database to the federal government. While this amount has been downgraded from the original one million URLs requested, along with one week’s worth of keywords typed into the search engine, it still poses a privacy problem, especially since other search engines such as Yahoo! and AOL were also asked for — and supplied — the information. Google was the only one that fought the subpoena for the data, citing user privacy and protection of trade secrets as their major concerns.

Even more bizarre is why the federal government wants this information. Last fall the ACLU filed a lawsuit over a 1998 law aimed at keeping “harmful Internet content” (read: porn) away from minors. The ACLU claimed the lawsuit was too restrictive and that current filtering software was enough to keep children from accessing porn on the web. The federal government is using the URLs and keywords to estimate the prevalence of porn on the Internet and to prove that filtering software, such as Google’s “SafeSearch” mode, is not effective.

Essentially, the government wants billions of search terms from all major search engines to fight ONE lawsuit over how easy it is for curious young children to find porn in the Internet. That’s overkill, especially considering there is a very easy four-step process to determine whether filtering software works or not:
Step 1: Go to Google. Step 2: Turn SafeSearch on. Step 3: Type “porn” as your keyword. Step 4: See if any porn sites come up.

There! Now we know if filtering software is enough! The extra data is unnecessary and can too easily be used for all the wrong reasons. Google said it best in an October letter to the Justice Department: “One can envision scenarios where queries alone could reveal identifying information about a specific Google user, which is another outcome that Google cannot accept.”

In fact, Google already links search terms to individual IPs (the address of your computer, essentially) so advertisers can synch their ads with products that you regularly search for. The technology is there; it’s only a matter of time before the government decides to use it.

Think about it. It’s really not that big of a leap to envision the federal government moving from requesting information about searching for porn on the Internet, to requesting information about searches for “Al Qaeda” or “Osama bin Laden.” Of course, then they’ll want to see who’s been searching for these terms, and suddenly everyone from legitimate terrorists dumb enough to Google themselves to college students like you and I doing innocent research, becomes suspect in the government’s collective eyes.

So what does this all mean for you, the random Internet user? For now not much, since the government only wants a select few keywords and URLs. For now the government isn’t looking at who typed those keywords in.

For now, you don’t have to be afraid to search online, but you do need to know that your information is being kept by the sites you visit and use. But if the federal government can order any of those sites to turn that information over at any time, who knows who’s going to get it next?


	March 22, 2006 California State University, Fresno