Under court order, Google reveals users' search history 9,000 times a year
nymag.com
nymag.com
In the context of lawsuits and court orders, the key to protecting privacy is to abide by due process concerns. In other words, sometimes otherwise private information can become subject to discovery through legal processes such as third-party subpoenas. A holder of that information, such as Google, has no direct stake in the fight between the parties and will not disclose such information voluntarily. Nonetheless, court processes permit litigants to use lawful means to compel disclosure. Notice typically must be given to the adverse party, who in turn has a right to contest the litigant's right to obtain the information. A neutral judge will then consider whether the information ought to be protected when weighing the importance of disclosure in such a case against any rights of privacy that might be implicated (it is this process of notice, opportunity to contest, and neutral judicial evaluation that affords the due process protections). In most such cases, privacy rights do ultimately trump disclosure but not in all. Thus, when a court orders that disclosure be made, a litigant is forced to make it and, if a third party such as Google holds that information, it too is ordered to make it, though it has no stake in the fight.
Since American law is not absolutist on the privacy issues, and since Google must comply with lawful court orders, I don't think it can be faulted for doing so. Also, given the likely huge number of times it finds itself in this position, I don't think there is anything untoward about a number such as "9,000 times a year." This is perhaps why Mr. Schmidt made his comment in such an off-handed way. This is just a routine part of doing business.
I will grant there are policy arguments that could be made to the contrary but, legally, Google is on sound footing in its handling of privacy issues as described in the article.
Does any form of law take an absolutist view of privacy rights?
The rhetorical purpose of pointing out that American law doesn't take an absolutist view of the right in question is to imply that someone disagreeing with the speaker is some sort of "absolutist" lunatic who's out of step with the law the speaker supports, which is of course sensible.
"private" documents/information are tangentially protected by various rules of procedure and statutes. for instance, a request for documents should have probative value outweighing the request's burden. however, i don't believe that there are privacy rights per se in very much or any of this.
the disclosure of a litigant's private information within the context and scope of litigation is the rule, not the exception. some people's favorite pastime is embarrassing their enemies through litigation. i have some sense of what that's like, having read thousands of litigants' personal emails.
Whether its existence is debatable is also, apparently, debatable.
Respectfully, you could have probably gotten the point across without resorting to that sort of writing.
Disagreeing with someone does not automagically mean that they are misleading.
I saw this quote on Hacker News a while back: "If you're not paying for it, you're not the customer, you're the product."
The customer of Google is the advertiser -- not the user. As part of Google's buisness of selling advertisements they are creating information about their users and turning it over to law enforcement ... presumably to be used against the users.
So what do they do? Delete logs instantly and provide no you search history etc. or..?
It is a balance.
Good: some criminals have presumably been convicted, some innocent people have probably been exonerated. Some crimes have probably been prevented.
Harm: jaded FBI agents have got an occasional giggle from looking through the search history of folks under suspicion.
For example, restrictions on freedom of press are usually for the greater good, in the short term. 99 times out of 100, the people you are defending with civil rights issues are total crackpots. But 1/100 times, maybe they are Thomas Jefferson writing the declaration of independence. The rare case is so critical that it is worth our time to waste our time with the remaining 99.
The truth is any large service provider is getting as many, it's just the modern version of forced disclosure.
A lot of the Google orders will be civil disclosure. That is mostly because in criminal cases there is more leeway for seizing the physical machines - which produces better results (from the perspective of court evidence).
But when you get to the ISP level they will be dealing with all manner of criminal/civil requests for IP log data.
Just some perspective (I won't comment my opinion on it)
It doesn't include three-letter-agencies that have their own access.
What I find kind of surprising is I've heard of very few cases that have used this information. They certainly never use it on Law & Order.
And, yes, you would need a judge to sign off on these. Google (more than most companies) are particularly anal (and rightly so) about disclosures such as these.
any ways to prevent that without making googling less easy?
> A National Security Letter (NSL) is a form of administrative subpoena used by the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation and reportedly by other U.S. Government Agencies including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Department of Defense. It is a demand letter issued to a particular entity or organization to turn over various record and data pertaining to individuals. They require no probable cause or judicial oversight. They also contain a gag order, preventing the recipient of the letter from disclosing that the letter was ever issued.
The gag order was later deemed unconstitutional, but that didn't stop them from issuing 200,000 of them.
My search history on http://google.com/history goes back to January 2007, which is over three years.
Maybe he meant that history entries older than one and a half years will be "rewritten" if you manually went and asked Google to remove them (by using the "Remove Items" function in the history). I wonder how many people are aware of that function.
AOL apparently uses the semi-secret child porn hash database to proactively scan content traversing its systems and reports to the authorities when they get a hit.
I'm sure other large providers do this, and it wouldn't surprise me if Google was one of them.
So me searching for "how much antifreeze..." wouldn't ever be noticed, unless i was _already_ under suspicion that met legal standards for a warrant, so that search data was requested.
You can find out more information here: http://www.google.com/transparencyreport/governmentrequests/ and the blog post we did about the subject is here: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/04/greater-transparency-...