Google Privacy Battle Likely to End in Compromise

A legal battle between the US justice department and internet giant Google looks set to end in compromise, after a US judge signaled he intended to make the company surrender some, but not all, of the data on its huge search database.

The US district court judge James Ware told a hearing last night he would make a decision "very quickly", adding that he would allow the justice department access to some of Google’s index of websites and search terms.

The two sides came to court after Google refused the demands of the attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, to hand over records of the searches made on its website in January, to aid the administration in its battle against online child pornography.

In January, the justice department had demanded access to records of more than 1 million searches but it has dropped its demands to just 50,000 URLs - internet addresses - and 5,000 search terms of which, it said, it would only look at 1,000.

Judge Ware said he remained concerned about Google users’ privacy but said the reduced requests, coupled with a government promise to compensate the company for lost programming days, meant he would grant the government at least some of its demands.

"It is my intent to grant some relief to the government," said Judge Ware of the US district court for the Northern District of California.

Facing similar demands from the justice department, other internet operators such as AOL, Microsoft and Yahoo have agreed to hand over similar records.