AOL, MSN and Yahoo gave million of search datas (about child porn) to the Bush Administration, which wanted to resurrect the Child Online Protection Act. But only Google refused, to protect its databases and customer privacy [1]. To force them to comply with the subpoena, the US DoD is suing Google!
The Bush Administration wanted to resurrect an old law, the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). To proove that software protection is not as effective as law enforcment, it asked for million of datas to major search engines. The Feds were interested in searches related to child porn. This happened last year, but we only begin to hear about that.
At least AOL, MSN and Yahoo complied by giving away datas, without really worrying about the privacy of their users. There is very little official information on the search engines websites.
MSN published a Privacy and MSN Search article [2] in which they swear they didnt share personnal consumers datas, by providing agregate informations only. Not very convincing.
As Google wanted to better protect its consumer datas and precious secret databases, they didnt comply with the subpoena. And the Us DoD decided to suit them.
The news originated from mercury news, and spreaded like fire among blogs and other online resources.
Here are a few links to articles and help you make your opinion.
Refs
- Mercury News [3] : Feds after Google data [4]
- News.com [5] : Feds take porn fight to Google [6]
- Bloomberg [7] : Google Sued by U.S. Over Access to Pornography Data [8]
- Boing boing [9] : DoJ search requests: Google said no; Yahoo, AOL, MSN yes. [10]
- Matt Cutts blog [11] : Government requests search engine records: Google says no [12]
- Search Engine Watch [13] : Bush Administration Demands Search Data; Google Says No; AOL, MSN & Yahoo Said Yes [14]
- SiliconValley.com [15] : Feds after Google data [16]
- Google blogoscoped [17] : In Google vs Government, It's Not About Child Porn [18]
- MSDN blog [19] : Privacy and MSN Search [20]