Privacy

The US government is taking in a mouthful for this Child Online Protection Act. The Act, brought in by the Bush administration, works to make sure that sites with pornography are not available to minors. Critics of this proposal are quick to point out that the methods used to do this involve invasion of privacy for many many people. The Supreme Court declined to rule on it, saying that the decision needed to be put on a full trial to determine if it was constitutional.

This trial is causing quite a stir with subpoenas for search terms of a broad swath of the search engine's visitors. All major search engines were subpoenad. The government claimed that they wanted to find out the terms used in searching were. However, it seems that Yahoo's contribution of this information was not enough. Without actually giving all information about the searchers themselves, this information would seem to be useless. IF the government gets the entirity of the information, then it would seem that an invasion of privacy had taken place. Now, not only does the search engine have your details, so does the government.

So far, only Google is fighting back. Google is also the biggest collector of personal information. So what is next? who knows. It is the next few weeks that will determine how safe the world is from the US big brother.