A federal judge ruled that Google need not hand over user’s search queries to the government. Judge James Ware’s rule has limited a subpoena issued to Google by the Department of Justice and Google will have to turn over only 50,000 urls instead of the billions of urls demanded by the government.


A federal judge ruled that Google need not hand over user’s search queries to the government. Judge James Ware’s rule has limited a subpoena issued to Google by the Department of Justice and Google will have to turn over only 50,000 urls instead of the billions of urls demanded by the government.

According to Google privacy was not the legal issue because the government was not asking for personally identifiable information. But Google felt that handing over search queries would have undermined users confidence in Google. Google considers the ruling of the court as a victory to the users and to the company.

Nicole Wong, Associate General Counsel, has posted on the official Google Blog:
“As we noted in our briefing to the court, we believe that if the government was permitted to require Google to hand over search queries, that could have undermined confidence that our users have in our ability to keep their information private. Because we resisted the subpoena, the Department of Justice will not receive any search queries and only a small fraction of the URLs it originally requested” [source]

To read the government’s original subpoena (7 pages), click here.

To read the ruling of the federal judge limiting government’s subpoena (21 pages), click here.

Both the documents are in Pdf format. You will need Adobe Acrobat to read this report. To download a free acrobat reader click here.

 

 

 

 

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