Subpoena: No personal data released

Privacy is a serious thing. That’s what I thought when last week I heard about the subpoena on Google, Yahoo, MSN and AOL. Last week I was also concerned about how all these players except Google had accepted the DOJs request to deliver what was previously announced (in the press) personally identifiable information. Yesterday at Search Champs (the event I’m attending in Redmond) all of us attending learned otherwise.

Getting to the facts

Yesterday we heard (initially under NDA, released after a request by some of us in the Web 2.0 Workgroup) about what was actually released by MSN – and personally, I must say I was quite surprised to hear the facts in a non-press manipulated way. So to cut it to facts only:

• No personally identifiable information or IP addresses were shared
• 1 Million random results from the index, and the related search queries were released
• There was no connection to child pornography, but to children searching for porn on the web

Now, there’s a couple of funny things here. Firstly, anyone can go and request the search query information from the search engines (particularly if you’re doing it for academic research purposes); Second, how the press manipulated the story to lead everyone to believe that this was somehow related to child pornography, when it was actually related to children looking for porn on the internet – and to quote Chris Pirillo, who didn’t see a Playboy as a kid?

Should we be concerned?

The problem here isn’t what was shared, because we’ve now learned that it was nothing identifiable. The problem here is the precedent. This case proves that the government (whether it’s the United States government, or any other) can request information about what you’re looking for on the web. Now, everybody knows that this information is being collected everyday, but what do we – as users – expect companies to do with it?

Personally, I’d like companies to be transparent about this sort of situation – it is easy to assert that MSN’s biggest mistake in this story was not telling its users about the DOJ request. But I don’t want search companies to go at this alone. There needs to be a conscious effort to protect the user’s data, from all these players – together, not individually. Until we see that, this sort of story will continue to surface.

Discussion

Some of us at the Web 2.0 Workgroup decided to do a podcast with some great guests to discuss the situation. We had myself, Joshua Porter, Alex Barnett from Microsoft, Chris Pirillo, Thomas Vander Wal, Dion Hinchcliffe and Brady Forrest from the MSN Search Team.

Download the podcast – 42 minutes, 7mb

Alex and Joshua are talking about this as well. Update: Dion and Robert Scoble also have their takes on this.