Privacy experts condemn subpoena of Google

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Right-to-privacy groups said on Friday an attempt by the Bush administration to force Google Inc. to turn over a broad range of materials from its databases set a dangerous precedent that should worry all Americans.

"This is the camel's nose under the tent for using search engines and all kinds of data aggregators as surveillance tools," said Jim Harper of the libertarian Cato Institute who also runs Privacilla.org, an Internet privacy database.

The Bush administration is already under fire from a number of rights groups over security measures it has taken since the September 11, 2001 attacks on America, including pursuing checks on library records and eavesdropping on some telephone calls.

In court papers filed on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, the Justice Department stated that Google had refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for one million random Web addresses from Google's databases as well as records of all searches entered on Google during any one-week period.

The government said it needed the information to prepare its case to revive the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which the Supreme Court blocked from taking effect two years ago.

The law prohibited Internet companies from knowingly making available obscene or pornographic material to minors. The Supreme Court said there were potential constitutional problems with the law and sent the case back to a lower court for consideration. It is expected to be heard later this year.

The Justice Department said on Friday that America Online, Yahoo and Microsoft had all complied with similar requests.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales rejected concerns that the subpoena might violate individual privacy rights.

"We're not asking for the identity of Americans. We simply want to have some subject matter information with respect to these communications. This is important for the Department of Justice and we will pursue this matter," he told reporters.

A Google spokesperson said the company objected to the breadth of the government's request but did not consider it to be a privacy issue since the search terms would not include personally identifiable details.

But others were not reassured. Massachusetts Rep. Edward Markey (news, bio, voting record), the ranking Democrat on the telecommunications subcommittee of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he would introduce a bill to strengthen consumers' Internet privacy by prohibiting the storage of personally identifiable information Internet searches beyond a reasonable time.

"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.

Chris Jay Hoofnagle of the Electronic Privacy Information Center worried that the government could follow up its initial request with a demand for more information.

"If Google hands over the search logs and the Justice Department finds search strings like 'child porn' or 'naked children,' could they not then go back and ask Google for the user's Internet address?" he said.

Ari Schwartz of the Center for Democracy and Technology said he was glad Google was fighting the case but the company needed to make privacy a more fundamental part of its products. He said the case was a wake-up call to all Internet users that information was being collected on them all the time and was stored indefinitely.

Danny Sullivan, an Internet consultant who created Search Engine Watch, said in a posting on his site: "Such a move absolutely should breed some paranoia. They didn't ask for data this time, but next time, they might."

On the other side, the Cincinnati-based National Coalition for Protection of Children and Families, a Christian fundamentalist group, said search companies should be willing to help the government defend children from pornography.

"I'm disappointed Google did not want to exercise its good corporate branding to secure the protection of youth," said Jack Samad, the group's senior vice president.

Thanks for the ping.

...the Justice Department stated that Google had refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for one million random Web addresses from Google's databases as well as records of all searches entered on Google during any one-week period.
The government said it needed the information to prepare its case to revive the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, which the Supreme Court blocked from taking effect two years ago.
The law prohibited Internet companies from knowingly making available obscene or pornographic material to minors.
"We're not asking for the identity of Americans. We simply want to have some subject matter information with respect to these communications. This is important for the Department of Justice and we will pursue this matter," he (AG Roberto Gonzales) told reporters.

A previous article cited the DOJs reason for acquiring this info was to "determine how often pornography shows up in online searches." This article is a little better but it left that out.

The information they are seeking cannot show whether even one child saw some porn from a Google search, intentionally or accidentally. It is completely useless for the stated purpose.

If the DOJ was seeking to bolster hate crimes laws would it be alright for them to sift through all these searches to see how often neo-Nazi websites get hits? Keep in mind that a search on word combinations like "guns Constitution," "black rifles" and "Confederate Flag" could easily produce those hits.

A Google spokesperson said the company objected to the breadth of the government's request but did not consider it to be a privacy issue since the search terms would not include personally identifiable details.

With a compelling set of numbers in hand would they then ask to see who is looking at porn and has children in the home? Nahhh. Not our gubberment. For hate crimes? Illegal guns?

I'm amazed that these privacy experts are all quite happy with a privately owned company, Google, having complete access to all this information, not just on a summary level but linked to specific IP addresses.

Are you saying that Google should not know what is happening on its own property, its owns servers? I have access to some of the same information that Google does, in regards to websites that I own or manage for others and traffic that comes across said servers. Free Republic has that as well.

And all of it without a single agreement with any of the people from which it has collected all this information, which Google claims is it's own intellectual property.

Now you are really confusing the hell out of me - Let me explain a few things - I'm not an expert, and if I'm wrong, hopefully others more knowledgable can jump in and clarify.

The information Google has, was obtained on Google's servers. They didn't send some kind of spyware down into your computer to pull this information, they simply logged certain bits of information traveling across their servers and their networks, that is very important to their bottom line.

Google has datacenters all over the world, literally. These datacenters are why you get such fast responses - if everybody had to search out of one datacenter in one physical location, things would be bad.

In those datacenters, Google has done some amazing things with clusters and load balancing. You can't have good load balancing if you don't know what your traffic looks like, or could potentially look like.

Those datacenters are constantly exchanging information - on websites that they have crawled (if you are concerned about your website being crawled, you can easily prevent it from being crawled, on levels of traffic, where the traffic is coming from, etc.

Sharing information between these datacenters is very important - for instance on one DC, such as 64.233.167.104, I may have 2000 pages indexed from one website, whereas 64.233.171.99 only has 1500 pages indexed from the same website. If Google doesn't collect the data, you end up with a mishmash of information, and while people in one location might be able to easily find your site, because of their DC, people being routed to another DC might not find your site, or find it as easily.

Moving over to searches and away from traffic information/analysis - those searches that you go in and type, are important to Google for two reasons:

The first is, unless it's changed, as searches are generated, they are saved, so that if you were to go to another computer and type in the same search, it will be much faster, because it already has found the information/results for that search term, and cached the relevant data. In the "old" days of the '90s, this wasn't always the case, and searches could be excruciatingly long. Now, if your daughter is going to a Hillary Duff concert, well other have probably searched on that already, and so when you type in "Hillary Duff concert, that search was done long ago, and you are getting the cached results, which is why it's so fast.

The other reason, is advertising, you know, the lifeblood that keeps Google's servers working.

If Google doesn't know how many people are searching for "Sony digital cameras", they don't have a good way of explaining to a potential AdWords customer how much traffic they might get, what their costs will be, etc.

Because of information Google has compiled in the past, I can go into AdWords, and I can say "I would like to buy an advertisement centered around the words "Sony digital camera". I say "this is how much I want to spend overall, and this is how much I want to spend on each individual advertisement/click".

Google's neat little software tools check the information they've compiled from people searching, and they come back and tell me "based on your overall budget, plus your per ad/click budget, this is probably where your advertisement will be placed (how many pages down), and this is the estimated traffic that will see your ad".

I'm not happy, so I bump my budget up, Google comes back and says "okay, now you are going to be in this approximate position (several pages higher in a search for instance), and because of that, your traffic is going to look like this".

If Google didn't have all of this information, and have it all together, we wouldn't have such efficient searches, and we wouldn't be getting truly targeted, contextual advertising, either as people seeing the ads, or as people publishing the ads.

Instead, advertising would be hit or miss, and so we'd end up with these big-ass pop-up ads everywhere that don't advertise anything we are interested in.

And without all of that advertising, a helluva lot of sites on the internet would not exist.

When your bandwidth/server costs run into 100s of dollars a month (or more), if you don't have the ability to recoup some of those costs, your little hobby site starts eating into your paycheck, and you have to take it offline. This used to happen a lot, before Google and others came in with good, targeted avertising.

We would literally be back in the '90s with these crappy little Geocities sites everywhere, that were constantly going offline because of bandwidth being exceeded.

Instead, you or I could setup a Conservative website somewhere, and we can do it for free, even if we don't have a group of dedicated people like FReepers directly contributing and it doesn't have crappy advertising all over it (it still might have advertising, but we get paid for that advertising, and it's usually ads that would appeal to Conservatives in this case).

I think I went off topic and rambled.

In other words, I trust the government with this information more than I trust Google. At least the goverment pretends to represent me, unlike Google, which wants to keep all my information in order to make money for itself by selling it to others.

I went so far off topic that I forgot to respond to this.

I wouldn't trust the government that tells me it's doing everything it can to protect me and my family from terrorism, including heavy-handed searches at airports, while leaving our borders wide open.

As far as the information Google shares, they aren't sharing your personal details, they are sharing traffic patterns, regional information, common searches, etc. - nobody is being sold your personal name and address. If you and 1000 other people from your area searched for "kayaks", then they can tell a potential advertiser "hey, if you target this area, there are a lot of people interested in kayaks, that might be interested in your products"

As a matter of fact, if you want to see what I'm talking about, you can sign up for AdWords yourself: adwords.google.com - and you can see the kind of information I and others can easily see. It's going to bore the hell out of you, unless you have your own business or find statistics interesting.

Best post on this topic yet from a technical standpoint. Thanks.

Thanks - I understand when people worry about what data is being kept, but unlike the government, the reasons Google, Yahoo, etc., track certain things are very transparent - you can poke around and see exactly what they are tracking and why they are tracking.

A lot of what the search engine companies do is really transparent - maybe not how they rank pages (i.e. which pages turn up at the top when you do a search) because those are very closely guarded corporate secrets, that if they got out, would be abused left and right by the spammers, but a lot of other things are.

You can check Yahoo's advertising keywords website - inventory.overture.com and type in keywords and see how many times they were searched for last month. It's a tool to help if you want to advertise (i.e. it would help you select the best keywords to use in your advertising), or if you want to gauge the interest of a topic that you are thinking about setting up a website on.

Right now it shows that Free Republic was searched for over 18,000 times - now that's Yahoo keyword look, so I'm sure it was searched a lot more on Google.

The government could do that - use tools like the one I linked above - but it's time consuming and the site is always getting hammered. It's also not presented in a format that would make it easy to compile a lot of statistics about.

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