Trust Me, Your Privacy is Non-negotiable.

Oh this just kills me.

Microsoft has a message for consumers who use its search engine: Don't worry, your stuff is safe.

Any information the computer giant hands over as a result of a Department of Justice subpoena will contain "absolutely no personal data," according to a statement posted on a company blog over the weekend by Ken Moss, general manager of MSN Web Search. "Privacy of our customers is non-negotiable and something worth fighting to protect. We tried to strike the right balance in a very sensitive matter."

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Oh, that's good.

This is all part of the COPA system that is trying to work out how to identify child pornography and those that use/disseminate it.

The federal government's requests--which amount to a list of one million random Web addresses and a week's worth of search queries--is supposed to help the government build a case that Internet porn is readily accessible to minors, thus creating a need for its once-denied Child Online Protection Act (COPA).

Google's fighting the whole thing, but I find it highly unlikely that it's about privacy. The data requested can easily be cleansed of identifiers.

Google's claim that the subpoenas could reveal trade secrets is up for debate: Aitan Goelman, partner with the Washington, D.C.-based law firm of Zuckerman Spaeder, says he doubts the data the government is looking for would reveal how Google executes its searches, but allows that a clever competitor could sift through the reports and might "be able to get from Point A to Point B and have insight into Google's methodologies."

But it's more likely that Google is worried about the results of its search queries and not the technology that powers them. The compromise the Department of Justice has worked out with Google's rivals calls for the search engines to let the government see how often certain search terms were used, but won't let it look up specific IP addresses to what individuals looked for.

I'm still betting on the issue of trade secrets though. Other companies have found ways to cleanse the data, so you can be certain that Google could do the same. The other part could very well be that porn searches are a significant amount of Google's bandwidth and providing such data would show just how much there is.

Google and its competitors all benefit from porn sites, which help generate search queries and page views. But Google is the only portal company that makes nearly all of its revenue from click-thru advertising. Restricting porn and porn advertising--the likely aim of COPA's sponsors--could hurt Google disproportionately.

And filtering in general would also hurt Google more than its competitors. The Google brand is built on the notion that the engine gives users the clearest picture of the Web, without playing favorites. Restricting content in any way could hurt Google's carefully burnished image, its 60% market share for search queries and its share price.

Google has a lot of self-interest in this whole query. User's privacy is much lower on the scale compared to keeping their piece of the market share and keeping up the stock price. Not that that motivation is wrong. It's just that making it sound like they're sole motivation is protecting user's privacy is a joke. If that was so, they wouldn't drop cookies into your browser every time you used their system. If you're a Firefox user, go to the Tools drop menu on the browser and click on options. When the window opens, click on the privacy label (little lock). Then click on the cookies tab and then click on "view cookies." If you use google you'll find their cookie on your system.

Oh and if you don't know what a cookie is:

An HTTP magic cookie (usually called simply a cookie) is a packet of information sent by a server to a World Wide Web browser and then sent back by the browser each time it accesses that server. Cookies are used for authentication, tracking, and maintaining user-specific information (preferences, electronic shopping cart, etc.)

Cookies have been of concern for Internet privacy, since they can be used for tracing the browsing of a user. As a result, they have been subject to legislation in various countries such as the United States, as well as the European Union. Cookies have also been criticized because the identification of users they provide is not always accurate and because they can be used for network attacks. Most modern browsers allow users to decide whether to accept cookies, but rejection makes several Web sites unusable. Some alternatives to cookies exist, with different drawbacks and features.

So your privacy is not really that much of a concern to the company that uses them.