Shielding youth against pornography 'outweighs privacy and trade secret concerns'

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

Instead of the initial request to hand over millions if not billions of search queries, a government representative said that it would be seeking only 50,000 web addresses and 5,000 search queries. A ruling is expected in the coming days or weeks.

The US government requested last year that Google hand over all search queries, and the URLs that they identify, over a one-month period, and later revised the request to one million URLs and one week of anonymous search queries.

The US Department of Justice claimed that it required the information 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," Google said in response to the subpoena in February.

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

The case has raised concerns over online privacy and the government's right to subpoena online service providers to hand over data without users' knowledge or consent.

A perceived lack of privacy could cause users to shun online storage services, including Google's Search Across Computers which stores users' documents temporarily on Google's servers.