Google Loses Request to Quash

Google tried to tell the government that it did not have to comply with a subpoena. A judge says otherwise after the US DoJ agreed to a compromise. A complete ruling is expected soon.

From Reuters here:

SAN JOSE, California (Reuters) – A U.S. federal judge said on Tuesday he intends to give the government some of what it wants after it scaled back the number of Google Inc. customers it wants information about, in a case seen as a major test of Internet privacy.

In a surprise, the government on Tuesday reduced the number of Google searches it wanted data on to just 50,000 Web addresses and roughly 5,000 search terms from the millions or potentially billions of addresses it had initially sought.

“It is my intent to grant some relief to the government,” said Judge James Ware of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California.

“Would the study be hobbled” if Google did not yield to government demands, the judge asked government attorney Joel McElvain in one of several interruptions.

“We could perform the study. The study would be substantially improved if we had the Google data,” the government attorney replied.

The government wants the search terms to test the effectiveness of filtering systems designed to protect children from sexually explicit material on the Internet.

Google is seeking to quash the subpoena in a battle over privacy issues on the Web.

This compromise is going to seriously degrade the effectiveness of the Government study by forcing the government to use lower sampling rates for its data. Thus any conclusions of this study could easily be challenged by statisticians to be incomplete or faulty. So Google lost its motion to quash, but the government lost in a way too. Its study to protect children from online pornography has been fatally shot by a giant corporation who claims to have the motto of “Don’t Be Evil.”