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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.
Thanks for the info. The precedent is alarming (but hardly a surprise).
When I first read the story, with the child porn interpretation, I half-assumed the US gov were pursuing a strategy not unlike one used periodically by politicians in the UK. Child porn is the ultimate evil, hence anything that is done to prevent it is justifiable, including intrusions into privacy and “soft” human rights violations. It’s also wonderful for shifting attention from the boring old government-making-a-bad-job-of-it stories to sicko-prurient entertainment.
Why I only half-assumed this was that there’s a bigger bogie man in the political spin world now - the terrorist. I could be wrong, but it seems likely that Google, MS etc are already volunteering personal information about individuals, but the “war on terror” label means it remains secret.
Whether that’s the case or not, what may be a rather alarming subtext here is that the DOJ consider the web companies such an easy touch. If they can go sniffing for young porn searchers (when porn is a well-known ugly little artifact of the web) and get moderate results, who knows what they expect when the perceived evil is a few orders of magnitude worse, as in the case of child porn and “terror”. An appropriate cliche might be: thin end of the wedge.
I agree absolutely that companies should be transparent about these things. Some vigilance is needed from everyone working on the web : “First they came for the porn servers and I did nothing because I was not into porn…”
Comment by Danny — January 26, 2006 @ 8:49 pm