Folks at the US Department of Justice are interested in seeing what us li’l citizens are interested in searching for. They asked Google to provide ‘em with a month of query data and Google refused. Note that this isn’t about National Security or protecting America from terrorism. It’s “assist[ing] the Government in its efforts to understand the behavior of current web users, to estimate how often web users encounter harmful-to-minors material in the course of their searches, and to measure the effectiveness of filtering in screening that material.” So they’re just interested in finding out how often folks encounter porn (and possibly other things in the future?) on the web.
It’s not that hard to search for adult content on the web. Lawyers are often smart people and I’m sure it wouldn’t be too hard for them to figure out how to use a search engine and see for themselves how often adult material shows up. But the government should have no special powers to get private information gathered by search engines if the search companies don’t want to make this information public.
As a public service I started making a little web application where people can post common search-engine queries and providing the DOJ with a URL that they can use to ‘harvest’ this information. I’ll post it soon. Then you can provide search strings that characterize searches that you make on Google. And Google can keep protecting the privacy rights of her users.
You know, I’m just doing my part to keep the web safe for everybody.
23jan2005 - JUST POSTED! - little Laszlo app that you can add to the list that I’m making available for interested parties at this XML feed.
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