p2p news / p2pnet: Google must give the US Department of Justice information from its databases, but US district judge James Ware, “did not immediately say whether the data will include words that users entered into the Internet’s leading search engine,” says the Associated Press.

Google has been resisting demands from the Cheney / Bush administration to hand the material over whereas Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft caved in.

“The Justice Department downplayed Google’s concerns, arguing it doesn’t want any personal information nor any data that would undermine the company’s thriving business,” says AP.

“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.

“The government believes the requested information will help bolster its arguments in a pornography case in Pennsylvania” which has, “focused attention on just how much personal information is stored by popular Web sites like Google — and the potential for that data to attract the interest of the government and other parties,” says the story.

The victory would probably encourage far more invasive requests in the future, the story has University of Connecticut law professor Paul Schiff Berman, who specializes in Internet law, saying.

“The erosion of privacy tends to happen incrementally,” he said. “While no one intrusion may seem that big, over the course of the next decade or two, you might end up in a place as a society where you never thought you would be.”

Also See:
Associated Press – Judge to order Google to give up some data, March 14, 2006
caved in – Google vs Bush, March 13, 2006

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