InfoTech & Public Policy

Very recently, a decision has been made by the Department of Justice and Google to appear in court over the handling of private web queries made by Google users.

The Dept. of Justice under direction of the President and his Cabinet is making a move to make it harder for minors to access pornography online. In order to do so, they are asking for a list of queries from the online search engine Google. Initially, the D.o.J. had asked for about a month’s worth of queries, but later changed this to one week’s worth. Recent reports show that the government may be willing to narrow this timeframe even further (AP.org).

However, Google has taken an adamant stance about protecting the rights of their users. Co-founder of Google Sergey Brin said that [cooperating with the government] “is a slippery slope and it’s a path we shouldn’t go down.” (Yahoo! AP headline) Part of Google’s concern is that divulging just a little bit of information on a singular basis will open the floodgates to more data mining. But does Google’s resistance suggest that they might be collecting too much/too valuable information?

Google’s privacy policy contains the following line:

[Google] “may share aggregated non-personal information with third parties outside of Google.”

So then why are they denying the federal government access when Yahoo!, MSN, and others have willingly given the desired information to the government?

This is likely due to the fact that Google contains very private information that links individual users to internet content through IP addressing. We have already seen an example in class where something as simple as a movie rental list can be detrimental to an individual’s reputation. So what then does the government want with all of this sensitive information? It turns out that they simply want to remove any ties between searching information and the searcher and try to research how effectively youth can circumvent anti-pornography controls by using a search engine. In interfering with government efforts, especially when it is in opposition to their very own privacy policy, Google sort of identifies itself as a major player in the information game. By resisting government efforts, Google may be protecting individuals, but at the same time, they seem suspect in their unwillingness to help out the greater population by making internet browsing safer for children. It seems to indicate to me that Google is maintaining information that it maybe should not be. So just how safe is Google, really?

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