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Comment by cletus | Hacker News Reader

I have a question: does this policy of DDG violate their legal responsibilities? Thats a serious question. I believe that law enforcement requires some form of data retention but I'm not sure what.

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No, nothing that I've ever come across says you have to save and store peoples' personal information. If you have it, then you have to abide for legal requests for it, but if you don't have it, you don't have it.

As a caveat, I remember some techno-illiterate judge ruling that having the data in memory constituted a record with the implication that by not persisting the record/document you were intentionally destroying it. I'll try to find the link.

edit: found it

A federal judge in Los Angeles last week ruled (PDF) that a computer server's RAM, or random-access memory, is a tangible document that can be stored and must be turned over in a lawsuit.

http://www.zdnet.com.au/us-ruling-makes-server-ram-a-documen...

This case was appealed in 2009. The Ninth Circuit did not directly address the issue but, reading this summary, it appears the district court's ruling wasn't quite as shocking as the headlines portrayed.

See http://lctjournal.washington.edu/vol5/a23Hall.html

IANAL, but I don't think so. What law would that be? If I walk into any retail store and pay with cash, is the store owner required by law to get my personal info? No, they are not.

Perhaps in heavily regulated industries such as banking that might be different but search engines are not government regulated (for now).

There are data retention laws in other parts of the world (many european countries for example).

But unless you do business in one of those countries you can pretty much ignore these laws.

It's a complicated subject. By law, you can not be compelled to create a document that didn't exist, but you can be compelled to produce a copy of the document that does exist. It becomes murky when you consider that IP addresses etc do enter the memory of the computer before being discarded, and thus can be argued to have temporarily formed a document.

There was at least one court case where a judge felt this was enough to say "you have the document, you must make a copy at my request". I don't remember the details of the case, and don't remember how it ended. I hope that sanity prevailed and the "thou can not be compelled to create a document" policy was reinterpreted in a more reasonable manner.

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