All Intensive Purposes

(I revised and added to this post, so I've reposted it.)

Lots of folks (e.g., Jacob Morse) are up in arms about the federal government's subpoena of Google search records and the threat to privacy it purportedly represents. If you look at the government expert's explanation of why the data is sought, paragraph 9, you'll see that he says, "Other vendors have been able to produce samples of queries with all information that might identify a user removed." If the government is willing to accept stripped data, what's the issue? I'm all for privacy, but this would seem to be a case where critics are assuming the worst.

Maybe Google has some reason to fear for the privacy of its users. According to the Financial Times, Google says "that acceding to the request 'would suggest that it is willing to reveal information about those who use its service'." But the article continues to suggest that privacy is not the real issue:

In its correspondence with the DoJ, Google did not cite privacy as the primary reason for refusing to comply. Instead, the company is most vigorously objecting to the government’s attempt to use its “highly proprietary” search database as a “free resource” to access and use to defend its position in court.

Yahoo, another search engine, acknowledged on Thursday that it was one of the companies that complied with the government’s demand, and said the DoJ’s subpoena did not represent a “privacy issue”. The company said it was a “rigorous defender” of its users’ privacy and that it had only complied with the request on a “limited basis”.

Unclear what kind of information the government would get from Google Robots.