U.S. Justice Department Addresses Google's Privacy Concerns

The U.S. Justice Department has denied requesting anything from Google that could threaten the privacy of the search engine's users, as the company recently contended. And by trying to block the government's efforts to review a week's worth of search terms, Google is holding up efforts to protect children from pornography, according to a brief filed Friday by the Justice Department.

The Justice Department was responding to Google's legal filing earlier this month, in which the search giant argued that the government's request for 1 million pages from Google's index, as well as copies of a week's worth of search terms, would harm the company in numerous ways. The information that the Justice Department requested is to be used in a study to help the Bush administration defend the 1998 Child Online Protection Act (COPA), an Internet pornography law. The government is seeking to highlight flaws in Web-filtering technology during a trial this fall.