Reports this past week about Google refusing to comply with a U.S. Justice Department subpoena for search records were top stories in newspapers, on blogs and probably contributed to an 8% drop in the price of Google stock.
Unfortunately, most of those media outlets got the story wrong, positioning it as a privacy issue. In reality, the issue was not about privacy, but (from Google’s standpoint), protecting trade secrets.
The Justice Department, in an effort to understand what sites might be delivering illegal pornography to users, apparently subpoenaed search and results data from Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. While the other three complied, Google refused. The purpose of the request was to document typical profiles of Internet use, to defend the need for the Child Online Protection Act, passed in1998.
What the Justice Department requested, though, were not records of individual users. Instead, they were merely looking at aggregate records of a week’s worth of search queries and of one million URL’s from the Google index.
Whether or not the Justice Department should have access to that is not my area of concern. Taking the “slippery slope” argument, particularly in light of how this Justice Department has viewed Executive powers vs. rights of privacy, it’s legitimate to make the argument that these subpoenas are inappropriate. My concern is more how this news has been portrayed through the media. If you skim articles in the NY Times, Washington Post and elsewhere, a reader would get the impression that it was a privacy issue. In other words, that Google would be disclosing the identity of its users, along with what they searched for and the sites they visited. A Washington Post article began "Google Inc. is rebuffing the Bush administration's demand for a peek at what millions of people have been looking up on the Internet's leading search engine _ a request that underscores the potential for online databases to become tools for government surveillance." That’s simply not accurate reporting.
The reporting is very similar to the articles a few weeks ago, that the NSA (or No Such Agency, as it was historically known as) was violating privacy rights by using cookies on their site. To read these articles, you’d think that the NSA was tracking the activities of users, then matching that to identities (and possibly to phone intercepts which are one of the things NSA is renowned for). Again, that’s not the case. Using cookies, they could know that “a user” had returned, and would be able to track their click patterns, but users don’t register at the NSA site. There’s no authentication. Cookies could not help the NSA identify individual users in any shape or form.
These two stories demonstrate a tremendous gap in the technical knowledge of the media. I don’t expect political or business writers to understand the nuances of cookies nor of search engine indexes. But, I do expect them to do the due diligence to understand the key aspects of the story. And, from the articles I’ve read, that’s just not happening.
We see similar problems when politicians jump on the bandwagon creating legislation to “solve” problems that don’t exist. The fax-ban, postponed in 2005, was a good example of legislation that could impact many businesses, but which served almost no purpose.
Technological changes are impacting our lives in significant ways, and will be sure to raise many new ethical and legal issues in the years to come. Somehow, our political and media leaders must take steps to understand the impact of those changes before they speak or write about them.
BTW - kudos to Danny Sullivan and Search Engine Watch, who were one of the few to get this story right from the start.
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