Should Google tell the US authorities what we search for?

[Taz]

I've been following this story for a little while in the background but now it's made it to the BBC site:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/4630694.stm

Essentially the US Department of Justice wants Google to hand over data about what people are searching for (i.e. the search queries and the search results).

I am fully with Google on this in that Google should not provide any information to the US authorities (of course, this is just my opinion). What do others think?

A counter-view could be that if you've got nothing to hide then what's the problem?

[Trippledence]

The problem comes when overstaffed US orginations start knocking on doors after some looks at infomation on Bombs, such as was the case with some books. This could go further, say been tartgeted after looking at information on file shareing, or hacking?

If google started to do this, someone else whould offer a seach endgine that didnt, and then people would start useing that.

[R0xy0urs0x]

no i dont think they should, becuase again its the authroties stamping down on "free speech" on the internet, i hardly think its of any "terroism" threat and find it difficult to see why they should know

[Workaholic]

I agree with everyone that they shouldn't do this.

And I am surpised at what it's used for. Surely asking google to hand over the user details i.e. ip address of whoever searches for something more Security threatening such as:

"Building a bomb"
"Blowing up the White House"

etc.

[TheAnimus]

If google started to do this, someone else whould offer a seach endgine that didnt, and then people would start useing that.

Maybe not, as the great firewall of china demonstrated, if people want something they don't want to put into google, they then go and use elgoog say, which results in everyone who ever has to need to use elgoog been a disident.

The trick with this case would be anonymising.

I have no problem with google been made to share user statistics, as they are probably already using them for their own end anyway.