How Google ensures data privacy

Google used Jan. 28-the date designated as worldwide Data Privacy Day-as the day to give more details about how it reacts if a government asks Goggle to give up information on its users.

David Drummond, senior vice president and chief legal officer, google, explained the steps on the Google Official Blog, as part of its commemoration of Data Privacy Day.

"It's important for law-enforcement agencies to pursue illegal activity and keep the public safe," he wrote. "We're a law-abiding company, and we don't want our services to be used in harmful ways. But it's just as important that laws protect you against overly broad requests for your personal information. "

To balance the needs of government investigators with the personal rights of users, Google follows a "longstanding strict process for handling these kinds of requests," wrote Drummond. "When government agencies ask for our users' personal information-like what you provide when you sign up for a Google Account, or the contents of an email-our team does several things."

The steps taken by Google:

• Carefully scrutinize the request to ensure that it satisfies the law and Google's policies. For Google to even begin considering the request, "it generally must be made in writing, signed by an authorized official of the requesting agency and issued under an appropriate law," he wrote.
• Evaluate the scope of the request to ensure its fairness and appropriateness. "If it's overly broad, we may refuse to provide the information or seek to narrow the request," Drummond wrote. "We do this frequently."
• Notify users when such a request is made, "when appropriate, so that they can contact the entity requesting it or consult a lawyer," wrote Drummond. "Sometimes we can't, either because we're legally prohibited (in which case we sometimes seek to lift gag orders or unseal search warrants) or we don't have their verified contact information."
• Require government agencies to serve Google with a search warrant when conducting criminal investigations. That way, the courts must rule to compel Google "to provide a user's search query information and private content stored in a Google Account-such as Gmail messages, documents, photos and YouTube videos," rather than handing it over without good reason, wrote Drummond.