Yay Google!
Jan. 19th, 2006 21:07![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
torquillGoogle refuses to release data to Feds.
The Justice Department isn't after it for national security reasons -- they just want Google to do their research for an attempt to resurrect a law restricting access to porn by minors. The law was struck down in 2004.
Other, unnamed search engines have complied with the subpoenas, but Google will fight the government's effort "vigorously", claiming that handing over the data would compromise customer privacy and their own trade secrets.
The Justice Department isn't after it for national security reasons -- they just want Google to do their research for an attempt to resurrect a law restricting access to porn by minors. The law was struck down in 2004.
Other, unnamed search engines have complied with the subpoenas, but Google will fight the government's effort "vigorously", claiming that handing over the data would compromise customer privacy and their own trade secrets.
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no subject
Date: 2006-01-20 06:31 (UTC)Ironically, if the feds are trying to prove that porn shows up a lot in web searches, they probably actually don't want Google's data. I think of all the years I've been performing searches on Google I haven't seen a single porn site come up at all. Even if you go to Google's image search and turn the "safe search" feature off, there isn't a lot of porn that seems to come up, really (mostly it's just graphic stuff from non-porn sites here and there). All I can figure is Google does a pretty good job of not indexing those sorts of sites in the first place, so it's not a big issue..
On a related note, I've lately become a big fan of scholar.google.com, and some of the other searches they seem to have sorta snuck in look rather cool too. There's a surprising number of nifty gadgets hidden behind that spartan main page, actually.