Google Inc. has argued that turning over more than a million of
its search records to the U.S. government would undermine users'
trust in its service and compromise its trade secrets.
Arguing against a government subpoena that seeks a week's worth
of search data from the company, Google also argued that the
request places an undue burden on it and asked the district court
in San Jose, California, to reject the government's motion forcing
Google to comply.
"Google users trust that when they enter a search query into a
Google search box, not only will they receive back the most
relevant results, but that Google will keep private whatever
information users communicate absent a compelling reason," the
company's lawyers wrote in court papers filed Friday.
"The Government's demand for disclosure of untold millions of
search queries submitted by Google users and for production of a
million Web page addresses or 'URLs' randomly selected from
Google's proprietary index would undermine that trust,
unnecessarily burden Google, and do nothing to further the
Government's case in the underlying action."
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) requested the information
in August last year. It says it wants it to use in a separate case,
to help determine whether a federal law called the Child Online
Protection Act (COPA) is more effective than filtering software in
preventing minors from accessing harmful material on the
Internet.
Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division and America Online
Inc. were issued with similar subpoenas and all complied with the
request to some degree. The government says the search data is not
tied to individual users and will not reveal people's individual
search habits.
The request for data comes at a sensitive time for the four
search companies. Last week, members of the U.S. House of
Representatives branded them a "disgrace" for allowing the Chinese
government to censor content from their services. The search giants
have said their actions are part of doing business in countries
with restrictive laws, and that even a modified version of their
service will help to encourage free speech.
The DOJ has until Feb. 24 to respond to Google's arguments. A
hearing in the case, brought by U.S. Attorney General Alberto
Gonzales, is set for March 14.
The DOJ did not issue a response to Google's latest arguments
and could not be reached for comment Monday, a public holiday in
the U.S.
The DOJ is defending COPA in a 1998 suit filed by the American
Civil Liberties Union, which says the law violates the U.S.
Constitution's First Amendment right to freedom of speech.
The DOJ says the search records from Google and its peers will
help it to prove that filtering technologies are not an effective
way to prevent minors from accessing harmful content. The ACLU says
that they are.
In its court papers Friday, Google said it uses confidential
methodologies and algorithms to arrive at its search results. The
government's experts would have to study these techniques to make
its search data useful to them, and this would put the company's
trade secrets at risk, it said.
"Competition with Google is fierce. Google's competitors could
use Google's confidential query data to manipulate their search
engines to accommodate Web users and run queries similar to
Google's," its lawyers wrote.
They argued that the government has fallen "woefully short" of
showing that the search data will be of any use to it, calling some
of its reasoning "so uninformed as to be nonsensical."
People sometimes filter their search results using Google's
built-in pornography filter or by creating "advanced queries." That
means the same query could generate different results, making the
data misleading and unhelpful to the government, the company
said.
Searches performed by Web bots and by people who run the same
query repeatedly to check their search ranking can also skew the
results, the company said.
To protest the government's subpoena, one person even wrote a
program for the Firefox Web browser that sends a random pornography
query to Google every time a user enters a query, in a bid to skew
Google's search records, the company said.
The ACLU's challenge to the COPA laws has so far been
successful. The Pennsylvania court in which the lawsuit was filed
granted the ACLU's motion for a preliminary injunction, and an
appeals court affirmed it in 2000.
The case went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which eventually also
affirmed the preliminary injunction and sent the case back to the
lower courts for a trial. The government and the ACLU are now
preparing for that trial.
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