Google takes a tougher stand against sharing search data

Google has toughned its stand against U.S. Justice department, saying the request for a list of week’s search terms should not be granted since it will reveal its trade secrets and violate its user’s privacy rights.

In a strongly worded legal brief submitted with a federal judge in San Jose, California., the company accused prosecutors of a "cavalier attitude," saying they were "uninformed" about how search engines work and the importance of protecting Google’s confidential information from disclosure.

The Justice Department asked a federal judge to force Google to turn over the data last month, after Google refused to comply with an earlier subpoena. Government lawyers said the searches would help it defend the Child Online Protection Act, which was struck down as unconstitutional. The law is designed to keep children from sexually explicit material on the Internet.

The Justice Department has a week to submit a written response. A hearing is scheduled for March 13 in U.S. District Court in San Jose.

It may be recalled here, that Google is the only one resisting to submit this data to the Justice department. Rivals Microsoft and Yahoo have already complied with the request.

Google’s lawyers said the company shares the government’s concern with materials which are harmful to minors but argued that the request for its data was irrelevant. They offered a series of technical arguments why this data was not useful.

The Mountain View, California-based company said that complying with the U.S. government’s request for "untold millions of search queries" would put an undue burden on the company, including a "week of engineer time to complete."

"Algorithms regularly change. The identical search query submitted today may yield a different result than the identical search conducted yesterday," the company’s external legal counsel argued in the filing.