Google rejects search info bid
2006-02-18 12:22
San Francisco - Google on Friday formally rejected the US justice department's subpoena of data from the web search leader, arguing the demand violated the privacy of users' web searches and its own trade secrets.
Responding to a motion by US attorney general Alberto
Gonzales, Google also said in a filing in US District Court
for the Northern District of California the government demand
to disclose web search data was impractical.
The Bush administration is seeking to compel Google to hand
over web search data as part of a bid by the justice department
to appeal a 2004 Supreme Court injunction of a law to penalise
website operators who allow children to view pornography.
Google is going it alone in opposing the US government
request. Rivals Microsoft. and Yahoo are among the
companies that have complied with the justice department demand
for data to be used to make its case.
Google's lawyers said the company shares the government's
concern with materials harmful to minors but argued that the
request for its data was irrelevant. They offered a series of
technical arguments why this data was not useful.
Undue burden
The Mountain View, California-based company said that
complying with the US government's request for "untold
millions of search queries" would put an undue burden on the
company, including a "week of engineer time to complete."
"Algorithms regularly change. The identical search query
submitted today may yield a different result than the identical
search conducted yesterday," attorneys from Perkins Coie LLP,
the company's external legal counsel, argue in the filing.
Complying with the justice department request would also
force Google to reveal how its web search technology works -
something it jealously guards as a trade secret, the company
argued. It refuses to disclose even the total number of
searches conducted each day.
Google's resistance contrasts with a deal the company has
struck with the Chinese government to censor some searches on a
new site in China, a move that has drawn sharp criticism from
members of the US congress and human rights activists.
"Google users trust that when they enter a search query
into a Google search box ... that Google will keep private
whatever information users communicate absent a compelling
reason," attorneys for Google said in the filing.