A federal judge Friday denied a Justice Department demand for access to some Internet search queries of Google Inc. users in a closely watched case testing the limits of online privacy.
The ruling by U.S. District Judge James Ware in San Jose was a victory for Google, which argued that handing over the records would violate the privacy of people who might scour the Internet with terms as diverse as "best-actor nominees," "third trimester abortion" or "pipe bomb."
Although Ware required Google to reveal some information about the websites in its database, he ordered the government to reimburse the Mountain View, Calif., company for the time and expense required to comply.
But for Google -- a quirky dot-com with the corporate mantra "Don't be evil" -- the more important issue was whether it could restrict access to potentially revealing queries.
"We will always be subject to government subpoenas, but the fact that the judge sent a clear message about privacy is reassuring," said Google's associate general counsel, Nicole Wong. "What his ruling means is that neither the government nor anyone else has carte blanche when demanding data from Internet companies."
Privacy advocates cheered the decision as a check on the Bush administration's efforts to collect information about people, but noted that the trove of personal data gathered and stored by sites like Google was irresistible to investigators.
"This issue is going to come up over and over again," said Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "I don't think this should make anybody very comfortable about the future. Google still has this stuff and people will still try to seek it."
Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales issued subpoenas to Google and three other top Internet companies last year, seeking details of potentially billions of search queries as part of an investigation into online pornography. The Justice Department also demanded a sample of the millions of websites archived in the search engines' databases.
The other companies -- Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp. and America Online Inc. -- complied at least in part. Google executives balked and the case became a test of the government's reach in the Internet Age.
Yahoo, Microsoft and America Online declined to comment after Ware's ruling late Friday.
