Xeni Jardin: Regarding recent news that the Justice Department issued subpoenas for user search data to AOL, Google, MSN, and Yahoo — and all but Google complied in one form or another — EFF co-founder John Gilmore says:

If Yahoo, MSN, and AOL didn’t reveal any personal info to DoJ, let’s see them publicly post the results that they sent back to the DoJ.

They sent “a generic list of aggregate and anonymous search terms, and not results, from a roughly one day period” (AOL)? Let’s see it. The public can decide whether there are privacy violations in there.

They sent “a random collection of page URLs that we had web-crawled”? Let’s see them.

No need for barrels of ink to speculate with, let’s just look at them. There can’t be a problem with looking, if there’s no personal privacy issues involved. There’s no trade secrets here — these are queries typed by end users, and web pages set up by end users. Right?

Here at Boing Boing, we can’t write subpoenas — but we would like to know.

So, America Online, Microsoft, and Yahoo: will you please release the data publicly — or show us where it already exists online? This way, everyone who uses your services can take a look for themselves, and evaluate whether they believe the information shared was privacy-violating.

Thank you,
Cory, Xeni, Mark, and Pesco.

I’d like them to turn that data over also. If there’s no identifiable information in the information they provided the government, there should be no problem making it public and putting it on one of their corporate sites or something. Hell, since they can’t trace anything back, they’d might as well put it right there on the front page of their main sites.

I mean, no harm no foul, right? No need to worry about the info revealing anything about anyone if it doesn’t do that anyway.

Right?

Something tells me they’ll never share that information, and something else tells me that there’s a lot more in it than they’re willing to tell you.

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