Google had alleged the Motion Picture Association of America was using Mississippi attorney general's action as a tool of its private interests in content takedowns.
A Virginia state court of appeal has ruled that Yelp must disclose the real identities of seven individuals who posted anonymous, critical reviews of an Alexandria, Virginia carpet cleaning business, Hadeed Carpet. Yelp and free speech advocacy groups have decried the decision. Hadeed said that he didn’t believe that any of the reviews came from actual […]
Mississippi attorney general Jim Hood will subpoena Google records and emails to determine if Google facilitated the sale of drugs without a prescription and other illegal products, including counterfeit copies of movies, games and music. “Google is aiding and abetting criminal activity and putting consumers at risk,” says Hood, “This is of grave concern to […]
Google has written a blog post documenting their legal process and approach to dealing with government requests for user and search data, highlighting a new section now available in Google that also answers more of these questions. Governments routinely ask search engines like Google for access to user data for various reasons. From search logs, […]
Many headlines yesterday about two bloggers who received visits — and subpoenas — from the Transportation Security Administration after publishing a security directive that was emailed to them anonymously. The source used a Gmail account. So did Google get a subpoena, too? The company says it can’t comment either way, sending me this statement: We […]
There is a much longer post to be written on Google’s privacy policies and its history of combatting or complying with government requests for information and those of third parties using the courts to get access to user data. But I’ll take two recent items to illustrate the complexity and potential contradictions here. Google was […]
Group says Ask’s privacy feature is flawed from News.com reports that the Electronic Privacy Information Center has found a few flaws in AskEraser, Ask.com’s new privacy searching feature. The three problems are: AskEraser uses an opt-out cookie instead of an opt-in cookie. Ask stores the time that the user enables AskEraser, which can potentially be […]
Philipp Lenssen reports via Ben Ari’s blog that an Israeli court has compelled Google to hand over the IP address of a Blogger account. The conditions of this require that the blogger, who allegedly committed slander, not reply to an anonymous email to reply to the motion. Since this blogger did not reply to the […]
Eric Goldman has updated us on the ongoing Connor Sport Court and Rhino Court case involving Google. The case, which we covered in Want Competitive Keyword Information? Just Subpoena Google!, suggested that Google was going to hand over competitive keyword data simply because one company filed a subpoena for it. Google has, in fact, declined […]
Eric Goldman reports that Google has received a subpoena to turn over AdWords keyword purchase data that a company hopes will help it in a trademark case. Google plans to comply unless companies that bought the words “sports court” among others object to it formally.
Mark Cuban’s Magnolia Pictures Subpoenas Google over Pirated Videos from Google Watch reports that Magnolia Pictures, Mark Cuban’s film studio, has subpoenaed Google for the identities of those who uploaded his videos to YouTube. Cuban told Reuters: "We don’t expect to get valid user information," but if he does that he will ask the copyright […]
Steve Bryant broke the story that Fox subpoenaed both Google owned YouTube and LiveDigital for the name of the individual who uploaded the full four hours of the premier of 24. The premier was reportedly posted prior to the live airing of the show and Fox reportedly found out about it on the 8th of […]
News.com reports that a wireless hacker was sentenced to 15 months in prison due to the help of some Google searches. The wireless hacker conducted searches for keyword phrases on “how to broadcast interference over wifi 2.4 GHZ,” “interference over wifi 2.4 Ghz,” “wireless networks 2.4 interference,” and “make device interfere wireless network.” The court […]