Shielding youth against pornography outweighs privacy and trade secret concerns

A federal judge in San Jose, California on Tuesday has said that he intends to order Google to give up data on users' search queries after the US government agreed to water down it request.

Instead of the initial request to hand over millions if not billions of search queries, a government representative said that it would only be seeking 50,000 web addresses and 5,000 search queries.

A ruling is expected in the coming days or weeks.

The US government last year requested that Google hand over all search queries and the URLs that they identified over a one-month period, and later revised it request to one million URLs and one week of anonymous search queries. The department of justice claims that it requires the information in its quest to revive a law that aims to shield children from online pornography.

Google refused to comply with the request, arguing that it constituted a violation of privacy rights and that its database is a trade secret. Google's decision prompted the DoJ to file a lawsuit in January.

"Google is, of course, concerned about the availability of materials harmful to minors on the Internet, but that shared concern does not render the Government's request acceptable or relevant," the company said in response to the subpoena in February.

Other search engines including Yahoo, MSN and AOL have complied with the governement's request.

The case has raised concerns over people's online privacy and the government's rights to subpoena online service providers to fork over data without the user's knowledge or consent.

A lack of privacy there for instance could cause users to shun away from online storage sevices including Google's "search across computers" technology where users' documents are temporarily stored on Google's servers.