You are overstating there by a long shot. The guidelines are more along the lines of "if you have completely failed at making the police go away in any of the previous 72 steps, then you must comply, but hopefully you read our other guidelines that tell you it's a good idea to not create any records and if you must, to dispose of them frequently."
Many have a policy of destroying records immediately after books are returned unless you request otherwise (eg to be able to see your borrowing history in your account.)
My sense of most libraries doing that is more anecdotal than quantitative. Mostly just what I've heard from librarians and my experiences signing up for library cards various places that had some sort of relevant T&C clause or opt-in process.
They do present/display/advertise their most popular books. They track and fine you if you keep a book too long. They determine how much a book has been checked out and track usage at an analytics level to determine if the book should be taken out of circulation.
Maybe search engines should have a special status like libraries enjoy, but it's worth noting the centuries it took for public libraries to become a municipal requirement.
> They have a de-facto monopoly as the largest search provider for the general populace. > They are a public resource that is a requirement for many of us to use in our day to day lives.
Wait, what? Has the "defacto monopoly" been legally established? They're a "public resource?" Please cite the legal meaning of "public resource" and where it was established through legislation or judicial action that Google is one?
Jiminy christmas. I made a comment on hackernews and you're trying to parse it like we're in a court of law.
The fact is that Google is different than a mom and pop shop with a video camera. It's ludicrous to suggest otherwise.
Also, I don't recall comparing Google to smaller organizations.
I may be oversensitive, but when I hear terms like "They are a public resource" I assume you mean that they should therefore be regulated by the government and paid for with tax money.
I made a flippant comment following this thread of conversation:
> Is this really that different from police asking for security camera footage from a convenience store after a robbery?
> I think legally, Google is no different than any other business.
And when I came back to the thread there was a series of comments parsing my words.
I overreacted to the group and you were the target of that over-reaction.
I don't know where you live, but on my planet Google has an 80%+ market share.
What records are Google required to keep that e.g. DuckDuckGo are not?
1. Google is an ISP, is DuckDuckGo an ISP?
2. Google is a telecommunications services provider, is DuckDuckGo a telecommunications services provider?
Those are two major categories that require data logging and retention in the U.S., and there are a lot of countries that have their own data logging and retention laws. Google because of it's size has active business presence in more countries and would therefore ensure itself to be compliant with local laws with more vigor than a significantly smaller company, especially one that was more focused on search. Google has it's hands in a lot of different kinds of businesses, many of which have already been targeted for logging and retention laws somewhere in the world.
They are required to keep records that brick and mortar businesses do not.
They have a de-facto monopoly as the largest search provider for the general populace. They are a public resource that is a requirement for many of us to use in our day to day lives.
Google in this instance is more like a library card catalog that keeps records of all of the things people search for.
This is the same as asking a library for all people who looked for books on dogs.
Google not only has adults that search for things. They have grade school children in their datasets.
If you are OK with this request, are you OK with the subsequent request to facebook that says "give me the social network tree for all of the people within this dataset"? we're looking for a woman who knows one of the people that searched for Douglass on Google within the Edina area. And then the final query to AT&T, "we need the phone records for all of the households on this list of women who are within 3 links to people who searched for Douglass in the Edina area"?
This is an overly broad search with no particular limit and no logical connection to the crime. The police don't know for certain that the thief arrived at the image used via a google search, let alone a google search for someone's first name. They don't know for certain that the thief was in the Edina area. They don't know for certain that the thief was in the Edina area when searching.