Saturday, March 18, 2006

Google Doesn’t Need to Hand Over Search Logs

Nice – a judge decided that Google doesn’t need to hand over 2 months of user’s searches. Google, by objecting to the subpoena, now provoked a ruling which they say means “that neither the government nor anyone else has carte blanche when demanding data from Internet companies.”

So what does Google have to provide now? 50,000 random URLs. I suppose the US gov’t doesn’t know how to use the Google API... looks they might easily grab at least comparable data themselves without any official help from the Googlers. And don’t they already have this data anyway from the subpoena to the other search engines?

In retrospect, this decision also shows that MSN, Yahoo and others gave away their search logs even when they didn’t have to – even when they could’ve successfully and legally opposed to it.

[Thanks Wang Y.]

Google Doesn’t Need to Ha ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (12)

>> More posts

Advertisement