Google Is Sued After a Refusal To Cede Sex Data
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.
The most used Internet search engine, Google, was sued by the Justice Department after it refused to turn over information that may help the government monitor sexually explicit material on the Web.
A motion to compel compliance with a subpoena, filed yesterday in federal court in San Jose, Calif., said the government seeks the data to enforce the Child Online Protection Act, designed to protect minors from pornography. A challenge to the law is being reviewed by the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Justice Department said it asked for all Google queries for a week and for 1 million Internet addresses in the company’s database. According to the lawsuit, other search engines have complied with similar requests, “and have not reported that they encountered any difficulty or burden in doing so.”
“We had lengthy discussions with them to try to resolve this, but were not able to and we intend to resist their motion vigorously,” a Google lawyer, Nicole Wong, said in a statement. She said the demand for information “over-reaches.”
The information would “assist the government in its efforts to understand the behavior of current Web users, to estimate how often Web users encounter harmful-to-minors material in the course of their searches, and to measure the effectiveness of filtering software in screening that material,” the government’s filing said.
A spokeswoman for Yahoo, Mary Osako, said the company complied with the government inquiry on a “limited basis,” and didn’t give America “any personally identifiable information.”
The Internet search engine Ask Jeeves has not received any requests from the government, a spokesman said.
A Justice Department spokesman, Charles Miller, declined to immediately respond to questions about the lawsuit.
Privacy rights organizations successfully sued to block enforcement of the Child Online Protection Act after it was signed into law in 1998, according to the government’s lawsuit. The Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case.
Google objected to the government’s subpoena, saying it would disclose trade secrets by providing the data, as well as personally identifiable information about its users. In response, the government said it would keep the data secret and that the request wasn’t for personal information.
