Google's court battle with the US government over the
disclosure of customer search results has been postponed to 13
March.
The two sides had been expected to meet in court on 27 February
over Google’s refusal to comply with the government’s request to
hand over the data.
The district judge hearing the case has postponed the hearing
for two weeks without giving an explanation for the delay.
The Bush administration wants the search records to support a
new law that seeks to make it more difficult for minors to access
porn on the web.
The government says filtering software does not do a good enough
job in preventing minors from accessing porn sites, and wants to
force all such sites to demand log-in details before home pages can
be accessed.
Search data has already been provided to the government from
Google search rivals MSN, AOL and Yahoo, but Google is holding out,
saying it is not obliged to hand over such data.
Although the government promises that the random search data
required would not reveal the identities of individual surfers, the
government’s demands have alarmed privacy advocates, who have
applauded Google’s stance.
The Government want to scan the data to see how different sites
are reached by users.