Google v. US Justice Department

Google has just been sued by the Justice department because they refused to turn over information that the government wants to "monitor sexually explicit material on the web."

The Justice Department is making this move under the guise of the "Child Online Protection Act." Google did not comply because "providing the data [would] disclose personally identifiable information about its users.

"In response, the government said it would keep the data secret and that the request wasn't for personal information."

Google's response was to still not comply.

Yahoo! chimed in, with the following unintentionally hilarious quote. "We are rigorous defenders of our users' privacy," said Mary Osaka, a spokesperson for Yahoo!. "We did not provide any personal information in response to the Department of Justice's subpoena. In our opinion this is not a privacy issue."

Really Mary? Are you sure? If you were rigorously defending your users' privacy, you sure did roll over a lot faster to the Justice Department than did Google, who makes no such claims to being a "knight of privacy."

Google is starting to look like the actual knights of privacy here ...