NEW YORK, Jan 20: A legal standoff between the US Justice Department and internet search giant Google has added fuel to an already heated debate over the government’s right of access to potentially personal data.

Google’s decision to ‘vigorously’ oppose a government subpoena to turn over records on millions of its users’ search queries drew applause from privacy and legal watchdogs, although some also questioned the search engine’s policy of retaining vast amounts of user data.

“This subpoena is really overreaching and outrageous,” said Ari Schwartz, associate director of the Washington-based Centre for Democracy and Technology.

“We are glad that Google is resisting and we hope others would in the situation as well,” Mr Schwartz said.

The government says it needs the data to defend the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act in a federal court in the state of Pennsylvania.

The 1998 law, which has been challenged in various courts, would impose tough criminal penalties on individuals whose Web sites carried material deemed harmful to minors.

Google argued that the subpoena was ‘unduly burdensome’, especially given that the company was not even a party to the litigation in Pennsylvania.

“This issue is one of burden and also of feeling bullied,” said Susan Crawford, a cyber law expert and assistant professor at Cardozo Law School.

“This is an unbelievably large request for data. There is also a trade secret issue, in that Google might be revealing what they decide to save in particular files,” Ms Crawford said.

The Google case comes with the government already under fire from civil rights groups over warrantless domestic wiretaps carried out by the National Security Agency (NSA) with the authorisation of President George W. Bush.

Although the data requested from Google would not identify individual users, there are concerns that by acceding to the subpoena, Google would open the door to demands for more personal information in the future.

“I would link this with the NSA issue in terms of an overbearing government appetite for data, that it may not even know how to use,” said Crawford. “They want everything, even though they can’t understand it or parse it.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EEF), an online rights watchdog, accused the government of overreaching and asking Google to “do its dirty work” by collecting information about the Internet speech activities of its users.

But EFF staff attorney Kevin Bankston also pointed to a more fundamental problem in Google’s policy of logging all the searches users make — most of which are personally identifiable.

“The only way Google can reasonably protect the privacy of its users now and in the future is to stop collecting so much information about its users, delete information that it does collect as soon as possible, and take real steps to minimise how much of the information it collects is traceable,” Bankston said.

“If Google continues to gather and keep so much information about its users, government and private attorneys will continue to try and get it,” he added.

The White House on Friday backed the justice department’s efforts to enforce the subpoena and stressed that the request did not involve any “personal” data.

“It’s important information,” said White House spokesman Scott McClellan.

Google’s defiance stood in contrast to it online rivals.

Justice Department spokesman Charles Miller said Yahoo, MSN and America Online had all complied with requests for similar search data.

Danny Sullivan, an internet consultant and founder of Search Engine Watch, argued that the government was asking for more than it could ever handle.

“The sheer amount of data would be overwhelming,” Sullivan said.

“Moreover, since the data is divorced from user info, you have no idea what searches are being done by children or not,” he added. “In the end, you’ve asked for a lot of data that’s not really going to help you estimate anything at all.” —AFP