Google claims moral high ground in it's civil disobediance with the request to provide search queries to the US government for it's investigations of child pornography. MSN, Yahoo, and others have complied by providing anonymous and aggregate search queries. (According to news articles).
Yet Google shares this same basic aggregated search query information publicly on their website http://zeitgeist.google.com/ . Given that this is the same kind of information requested by the government (according to news articles), isn't Google violating their own "protections" of user privacy? Do they really have a legal leg to stand on denying the government subpoenas?
Why does Google share search queries with anyone and everyone if sharing them is an invasion of privacy?
I think there is more to the story than what we see here. I don't think the government cares what the most popular searches are, but rather they care about who is actually doing the searching. The site you link to in your update has a note, which states, "that in compiling the Zeitgeist, no individual searcher's information is available or accessible to us. What you see here is a cumulative snapshot of interesting queries people are asking – some over time, some within country domains, and some on Google.com – that perhaps reveal a bit of the human condition."
If Google doesn't have the individual's information, they can hardly give it to the government, and they are not invading anyone's privacy.
Reply:Your link leads nowhere.
Google not honoring a request for information by the government is hardly civil disobediance. If the government asked Microsoft for all their source code, is Microsoft legally obligated to provide it?
If the government wants that information, maybe they should just pay for it like any other client.
On the other hand, as with any client, if google does not believe that the client's intention is honorable, then they have the right not to honor the client's request.
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