More on Google's Trade Secrets vs. The Government

From Silicon.com, an article reporting that the government's brief "denounces" Google for maintaining that complying with the government's request for a week's worth of search data "would mean disclosing important trade secrets, take up too many of the company's resources to produce and harm its reputation with users."

No, says the Justice Department. Instead, "Google is holding up efforts to protect children from pornography."

This is another example of the difficult trade-offs between protecting trade secrets and government information and public records requests. Is Google legitimately trying to protect trade secrets, the privacy of its users, or is it facilitating illegality? Maybe all three. Companies like Google are to put hard choices in these cases.

It will be very instructive to see how the court rules.