Search Engines

Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and other search engines record your search queries and maintain massive databases that reach into the most intimate details of your life. When revealed to others, these details can be embarrassing and even cause great harm. Would you want strangers to know where you or your child work or go to school? How about everyone seeing searches that reference your medical history, financial information, sexual orientation, or religious affiliation?

Unfortunately, information stored with a third-party is given much weaker legal protection than that on your own computer. It can be all too easy for the government or individual litigants to get access to your search history and connect it with your identity.

Your search data demands more substantive legal and technical protections. Learn more about this issue below and take action to defend your privacy.

Google v. DoJ Subpoena

In January 2006, the Justice Department asked a federal court in San Jose, California to force Google to turn over search records for use as evidence in a case where the government is defending the constitutionality of the Child Online Protection Act (COPA). On March 17, 2006, the judge rejected the government's overreaching request for user records.