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Abstract

On 17 March 2006, Google, the major web search engine, won a partial victory in its legal battle against the United States government. In an attempt to enforce the 1998 Child Online Protection Act, the us government had asked it to provide one million web addresses or URLs that are accessible through Google, as well as 5,000 users' search queries. In Gonzales v. Google, a California District Court ruled that Google did not have to comply fully with the us government's request: Google did not need to disclose a single search query, and was not required to provide more than 50.000 web addresses. However, it soon appeared that Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo! had handed over the information requested by the government in that instance, and in the course of this case all search engines publicly admitted massive user data collection. It turns out that all major search engines are able to provide a list of IP addresses with the actual search queries made, and vice versa. Scarcely five months later, AOL's search engine logs were the subject of yet another round of data protection concerns. There was a public outcry when it became known that it had published 21 million search queries, that is, the search histories of more than 650,000 of its users. While AOL's intentions were laudable (namely supporting research in user behaviour), it emerged that making the link between the unique ID supplied for a given user and the real-world identity was not all that difficult. Both these cases are milestones in raising awareness of the importance of data protection in relation to web search.