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I Love Google

by Morgan McLaughlin Hornet Editor in Chief

February 01, 2006

There are many reasons I love Google. It has an awesome email service (Gmail), a cool news search engine, desktop search, and Google Earth. There are many more I could list, but you can look for yourself (http://www.google.com/intl/en/options).

Most of all, I love Google because it has a forward thinking customer service approach to business. Its unofficial motto “don’t be evil” is all about serving its users. Google strives to be useful in everything it produces while being ethical and upholding a code of conduct that is unlike any search engine service known.

More recently my affinity for Google has been reinforced by its resistance to a government subpoena for search records. Despite the pressure of the governments subpoena Google has respectfully declined to hand over their search information, unlike AOL, Yahoo! and MSN who gave it over without a second thought. The government’s data collection conquest has gotten out of hand.

They swear up and down that they have no interest in collecting personal information, merely search statistics, but if you give a mouse a cookie, he is going to want some milk. What will be next? Hand over search information and soon a request for ISP addresses will be made, or worse yet, information correlating to e-mail from the search data.

If I could comfortably say that the information would be given over in the interest of the greater good, I could say “ok.” But our current government has been employing the “give an inch, take a mile” methodology since Bush started his post-9/11 tirade.

Google is sighting the burden of compliance and a concern with revealing trade secrets as its main reason for resisting the subpoena, but Google is also aware of the possibilities: “one can envision scenarios where queries alone could reveal identifying information about a specific Google user, which is another outcome that Google cannot accept.” Google stands strong in denying the request that the government had no legal authority to ask for in the first place.

Some may cite that Google is hypocritically censoring search results in China for the communist government, while not complying with its own country’s requests.

I however, can do nothing but applaud Google for it’s commitment to confront our government. After all, it is part of our jobs as Americans to challenge our government.