Under court order, Google reveals users' search history 9,000 times a year

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2010/10/google_ceo_would_like_to_remin.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+nymag%2Fintel+%28Daily+Intelligencer+-+New+York+Magazine%29&utm_content=Google+Reader

by FSecurePal • 16 years ago

86 53 16 years ago

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rmg• 16 years ago

One of the reasons I like DuckDuckGo.

ceejayoz4• 16 years ago

Assuming the government doesn't quietly get a court order forcing them to log and keep silent about it, of course.

alexandros• 16 years ago

In that case, I'd be shocked if Gabriel continued to tout the fact that DDG keeps no logs. Surely a court order can't force him to keep doing that.

epi0Bauqu• 16 years ago

I can't see a situation where I could be forced to keep quiet about something like that. And then there is wikileaks or some equivalent. For the record though, I have yet to get a court order about anything.

tomjen32• 16 years ago

That is why you build your system in such a way that you physically _can't_ put a log in it.

grellas• 16 years ago

American law has never taken an absolutist view of privacy rights. For example, even lawyer confidentiality has exceptions, as for example when a client tells you he is going to commit a future crime (that is not regarded as privileged and can be disclosed by the attorney to the authorities).

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.

hugh33• 16 years ago

American law has never taken an absolutist view of privacy rights.

Does any form of law take an absolutist view of privacy rights?

Semiapies2• 16 years ago

No government's law takes an absolutist view of any right not belonging to the government.

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.

smalter• 16 years ago

respectfully, your post is misleading. it's not there there isn't an "absolutist view of privacy rights", it's that there is a very narrow "right to privacy." i put "right to privacy" in quotes because whether it exists at all is debatable (i take no view on the issue). i'm talking about privacy from a constitutional standpoint.

"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.

irons• 16 years ago

i put "right to privacy" in quotes because whether it exists at all is debatable (i take no view on the issue).

Whether its existence is debatable is also, apparently, debatable.

jacquesm3• 16 years ago

Whenever someone uses the word 'respectfully' it is invariably followed by something that indicates a lack of respect.

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.

notaddicted• 16 years ago

I don't fault Google for following the law, rather for creating information about their users that can then be used against them.

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.

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

They are in a bind over such things though; because storing historical search data helps them offer an improved service to search users.

So what do they do? Delete logs instantly and provide no you search history etc. or..?

It is a balance.

hugh33• 16 years ago

Ultimately, do you think more harm or good has been done by revealing these search histories under court order?

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.

qjz• 16 years ago

Confidentiality protections are not really intended to protect individual privacy rights. Several professions (legal, medical, etc.) rely on confidentiality in order to effectively provide critical services that benefit the greater good.

exit• 16 years ago

which jurisdictions is google subject to such court orders under? is it just a matter of where the datacenters are located?

tessro• 16 years ago

Am I the only one who was surprised at how low that number was?

ikujhygtfghyjuk2• 16 years ago

This is the number of request by agencies that bothered to get warrants.

It doesn't include three-letter-agencies that have their own access.

kenjackson• 16 years ago

I actually thought it was pretty high. That's like 25 times per day Google is sending search information to law enforcement. One thing I do hope is that they are requiring a judge to sign off on these like wiretaps. I'd worry about a jealous husband in law enforcement trying to find out what his ex-gf is up to.

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.

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

Most of these are likely civil warrants.

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.

Gotttzsche• 16 years ago

i was surprised they save my search history. :naive: is there even any legitimate use for that?

any ways to prevent that without making googling less easy?

brown9-2• 16 years ago

Pretty sure you can turn off your search history in your account settings.

cosmicray• 16 years ago

granted Google is the big fish in the search engine pond ... does this imply that a court order to Google also means that Yahoo, Bing, Altavista, et al, are also getting a similar court order for the same user ?

pedanticfreak3• 16 years ago

Considering Google gets 140+ million unique visitors, that's less than 0.0064% of all users? Color me unimpressed. Now if you told me personal information was being offered WITHOUT a court order, then I'd be more concerned.

jeebusroxors• 16 years ago

I think your math is off. The 140+ million unique visitors are world wide. Wouldn't these ~9,000 requests be coming from and directed to people in the US?

Semiapies2• 16 years ago

Why would that limitation exist? There are all sorts of reasons federal agencies would get court orders to look at international information held by a US company.

tomjen32• 16 years ago

What exactly are they going to do with their search history? Unless it involve kiddy porn or something like that?

Encosia3• 16 years ago

It's common to see news stories about dumb criminals who were targeted for more thorough investigation, leading to their eventual conviction, due to their Internet search history (e.g. "How much antifreeze does it take to kill an adult" and "how to mask the taste of antifreeze in food")

SageRaven2• 16 years ago

A lot can be done with such vast amounts of information. Don't you remember the AOL search data fiasco? Or how the Netflix ratings data can strongly correlate to one's lifestyle choices? Both of those data sets were "anonymized" before release -- just think of the damage data directly attached to a person could do to them.

Matt_Cutts• 16 years ago

Google recently mentioned that we get 1B visitors each week (and 1B+ queries each day), so 140M is way low.

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-...

pedanticfreak3• 16 years ago

While I can certainly concede 140M might be low, I think we might also be talking about different things. I'm talking about unique people, not page hits or sessions or cookies, and 140 million was a good enough estimate to make my point: The number of subpoena requests is dwarfed by the immensity of Google's user base.

ErrantX3• 16 years ago

The slight fallacy in the article (and in general on this topic) is the thinking Google are especially unique in receiving these orders.

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)

SageRaven2• 16 years ago

I'm curious if Google has a voluntary reporting system, such as the one outlined here: http://cyb3rcrim3.blogspot.com/2010/06/state-action-and-4th-....

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.

jacquesm3• 16 years ago

We do this too. To the surprise of some child pornographers.

julian37• 16 years ago

"He added that Google "rewrites" your search history after a year and a half, so that it can no longer be tracked, even under a court mandate."

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.

Under court order, Google reveals users' search history 9,000 times a year

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