Relevant bit:
"A lawyer for the Justice Department told Ware that the government would like to have a random selection of 50,000 Web addresses and 5,000 random search requests from Google, a small fraction of the millions the government originally sought."
As the saying goes: The mountain has labored and brought forth a mouse.
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Small as 5,000 may be, doesn't it set a precedent that can have larger consequences in the future? |
True, but at least the DOJ (and of course the public) knows that Google is willing to stand up and fight.
shouldn't there be much more being said about yahoo and msn giving in to the order? it may seem to people that their privacy is only under-threat if they search with Google and not msn/yahoo, because of all the media attention. whereas the opposite is true.
I'm pleased with Google for standing up against this request for data. even if they do have to give the 5,000 requests, i think they've won the fight. |
You might think they've won the battle, but clearly not the war. This is a matter of principle... if you give even one unique query, you have given up on a principle.
Of course, I doubt that will really happen. Google will just reformat the Zeitgeist and forward it to DOJ. :-) |
The reason that this was a fairly short and simple hearing, is that there's already a large amount of relevant law about how much a private business needs to reveal of their data. There's almost no new ground here. The precedents were set long ago.
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