Government Data Demand's Impact On Privacy Rights and Legal Cases

'm as big a fan of government intrusion as the next person, but things may have gotten a little out of hand lately. Take last week's legal contretemps between the Justice Department and Google. Forget for a minute that Google really faces no downside by refusing the government's request to turn over search data. Even if Google loses the case and has to turn over some (truncated) amount of (very general) information about a (random) selection of searches, it still wins in the court of public opinion as a defender of personal privacy. As my colleague Chris Murphy put it, Google should take the court costs out of its marketing budget.

Why should the federal government demand that search providers turn over their hard-earned data? Finders keepers, after all. Besides, search data is meaningless without context. Just because a man was convicted recently of killing his wife based partly on evidence of Internet searches for terms like "neck," "snap," and "break," what does that prove? That he was a do-it-yourself-Thanksgiving guy, as much as anything else, if you ask me.

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