1986 Privacy Law Is Outrun by the Web
SAN FRANCISCO — Concerned by the wave of requests for customer data from law enforcement agencies, Google last year set up an online tool showing the frequency of these requests in various countries. In the first half of 2010, it counted more than 4,200 in the United States.
Context & Ripple Effects
Law enforcement's access to web-company data has run through legal process designed around telephones: the governing federal privacy statute dates to 1986, before consumer email accounts, search histories, or cloud storage existed. Google's answer, set up last year after what it described as a wave of agency requests, was to publish the demand itself via an online tool counting government requests by country.
That tool put a number on a previously invisible flow — more than 4,200 U.S. law-enforcement requests in the first half of 2010 — and turned Google's compliance workload into a public statistic that users and lawmakers can read directly, rather than learn about case by case.
First-order effects
- U.S. law-enforcement agencies lose the quiet default of uncounted requests: every court order sent to Google now feeds a country-level public counter showing how often customer records change hands.
- Google converts a legal-compliance burden into a disclosure benchmark — its request volumes are now measurable while those of other web companies remain invisible to the public.
Second-order effects
- Consumer web services that receive similar orders face pressure to publish comparable statistics, because silence now reads as concealment next to Google's published counts.
- Each reporting period gives legislators fresh documentation of the gap between the 1986 statute and actual practice, strengthening the case for a rewrite that the pre-web law's drafters never had to answer.
Third-order effects
- If voluntary disclosure hardens into a standing practice across the industry, transparency reporting becomes permanent infrastructure between platforms and governments — and the dataset any eventual modernization of the 1986 privacy law would be argued from.
The trend: Internet platforms are converting opaque government data demands into standardized self-published metrics, filling the accountability gap left by privacy laws written before the web existed.