I have no idea how many subpoenas Google gets per day but my guess is that they get a fair bit of them. I also don't know how they respond to them but I'd wager that they comply with vast majority of them. What I'd like to know is how Google deals with out-of-US subpoenas. Do they comply?

I think you could argue that, due to Google File System's (GFS) distributed nature, you could request a subpoena from a local judge in any country in which Google has a data center because Google would have to prove that a chunk of data belonging to someone is not hosted in that country. That's very hard ot disprove since I doubt that Google keeps historical track of their chunks. The way GFS works, a master keeps tracks of chunks but it doesn't keep a history of where each chunk was. So a clever lawyer could try to subpoena anyone's account given that Google has a data center in their country.

For example, Google has a data center in UK. Could US person's account, be subjected to a UK issued subpoena if a lawyer uses the logic I described above? Maybe.. there's no way to prove that a chunk of your data is not hosted in UK.

Distributed systems ("cloud") are a privacy nightmare waiting to happen, and I think that EU privacy commission will tackle this issue at some point. "Cloud" computing seems to be illegal (to a certain degree, in strong-privacy countries like Germany).

More info here: http://www.jroller.com/MasterMark/entry/google_teh_evil_clou...