There's a lot of talk about the recent U.S. government request for Google and other major search engines to provide them with certain information about search queries used on their sites. This is in regard to a dispute about Internet pornography and the access minors have to it.

There is some confusion about exactly what is being requested. I do not believe that the information requested in this case is a particular privacy concern. The government has simply asked Google to provide them with a random sampling of URLs containing pornographic material and also all search queries used by all visitors within a given week. As I understand it, this list of search queries will provide no indication of who entered those queries and what sites were followed. It will just be a simple list of terms used collectively.

Google is fighting this for two reasons: They don't want to provide the government with momentum that could more easily allow them access to more sensitive information in the future, and they also want to appear as the good guys in the public eye on this particular case. Although I don't see any particular privacy concerns in this request itself, people will see imaginary concerns just as they did with Gmail ads. My guess is that Google learned a hard lesson after the whole Gmail issue and now realizes that the appearance of a privacy concern to the technically uninclined is almost as bad as an actual privacy concern. They want to keep up their trustworthy image, and so they are willing to put in the resources to fight even trivial requests that, to the uninformed public, appear to infringe on the users' privacy.

Anyway, if Google loses here, it could be costly in the long-term. The government nearly drools at the wealth of information that Google has and would gladly go to great lengths to try to snatch that information from them. This request is fairly insignificant, but if they get it, especially after a heated battle, they may get the momentum they need to start driving harder. I'm sure Google would like to draw the line in the sand right here, and I am very inclined to agree.

I agree here too, the line must be drawn here - if they get what they want they will shure expand that and want more and more information without reason. That cannot be allowed.

Ryan Jones