Uploader Beware

On Wednesday the Bush administration requested that a federal judge order Google, Inc. to turn over a broad range of material from its closely guarded databases. This is linked by an effort by the Justice Department to revive parts of the Children Online Protection Act (COPA) declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court in 2004. In court papers filed in U.S. District Court in San Jose, Justice Department lawyers revealed that Google has refused to comply with a subpoena issued last year for the records, which include a request for 1 million random Web addresses and records of all Google searches from any one-week period. Note that the government is not doing this in the name of national security. They want to find out how much porn people are looking for.

John Batelle is one of the founders of Wired magazine and is currently a visiting professor at the UC Berkley School of Journalism. He writes:

As we move our data to the servers at Amazon.com, Hotmail.com, Yahoo.com, and Gmail.com, we are making an implicit bargain, one that the public at large is either entirely content with, or, more likely, one that most have not taken much to heart.

That bargain is this: we trust you to not do evil things with our information. We trust that you will keep it secure, free from unlawful government or private search and seizure, and under our control at all times. We understand that you might use our data in aggregate to provide us better and more useful services, but we trust that you will not identify individuals personally through our data, nor use our personal data in a manner that would violate our own sense of
privacy and freedom.

ThatÂ's a pretty large helping of trust we'’re asking companies to ladle onto their corporate plate. And I’m not sure either we or they are entirely sure what to do with the implications of such a transfer. Just thinking about these implications makes a reasonable person'’s head hurt.