Google in Court
S previously mentioned, the American government seeks to invade the privacy of Internet citizens worldwide. The purpose of the subpoenas in question seems genuine, but effectivity is futile. Moreover, this boggles the mind as it serves as a precedent to privacy invasion. The only search engines to have opposed this was Google and they are facing the court nowadays, due to their resistance to violate trust with their customers.
Google was fighting a subpoena from the US Department of Justice as part of its defence of an anti child-pornography act subsequently deemed unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The probe had originally asked for a month’s worth of search queries in anonymized form, and the URL of every website that robots from MSN Search, Yahoo!, AOL and Google trawled.
The word through the grapawine is that Google’s stance has weakened and some limited data may find its way ‘outside’.