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once a request has been deemed valid, Google will notify users when possible.

Google says, "When we receive such a request, our team reviews the request to make sure it satisfies legal requirements and Google's policies.

Google will not provide a user's search-query information or the contents of a user's account (email content, pictures, documents, etc.) without a warrant.

Google has advocated for updating ECPA, "so the same protections that apply to your personal documents that you keep in your home also apply to your email and online documents."

If Google can establish clear practices now that somehow balance the competing needs of law-enforcement agencies and private users, that effort will pay off

Awareness of the problem is growing, from Google's catastrophic launch of its social network Buzz in 2010, which shared users' contacts without their permission, to the revelation last year that Facebook was still tracking users' browsing information after they had logged out.

The new possibilities for surveillance undermine the fundamental privacy of the act of reading.

No-one imagined that ISPs would one day offer gigabytes of online storage free—as Google, Yahoo!, Hotmail and other e-mail providers do today. The assumption back then was that if someone had not bothered to download and delete online messages within six months, such messages could reasonably be considered to be abandoned—and therefore not in need of strict protection.

wholesale access to the internet, powerful mobile phones and ubiquitous social networking have dramatically increased the amount of private data kept online. In the process, traditional thinking about online security has been rendered obsolete. For instance, more and more people nowadays keep their e-mail messages on third-party servers elsewhere, rather than on their own hard-drives or mobile phones. Many put their personal details, contacts, photographs, locations, likes, dislikes and inner thoughts on Google, Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Dropbox and a host of other destinations. Bringing online privacy requirements into an age of cloud computing is only fit and proper, and long overdue.

the international telecoms treaty that emerged focused on how telephone traffic flows across borders, the rules governing the quality of service and the means operators could adopt to bill one another for facilitating international calls. As such, the regulations applied strictly to telecoms providers, the majority of which were state owned.

he goal of certain factions is to grant governments the authority to charge content providers like Amazon, Google, Facebook and Twitter for allowing their data to flow over national borders. If enacted, such proposals would most certainly deter investment in network infrastructure, raise costs for consumers, and hinder online access for precisely those people the ITU claims it wants to help.

a proposal sponsored by the United States and Canada to restrict the debate in Dubai strictly t

o conventional telecoms has met with a modicum of success, despite stiff opposition from Russia plus some African and Middle-Eastern countries. Behind closed doors, the conference has agreed not to alter the ITU’s current definition of “telecommunications” and to leave the introductory text concerning the existing treaty’s scope intact.

The sticking point has been what kind of organisations the treaty should apply to. Here, one word can make a huge difference. In ITU jargon, the current treaty relates only to “recognised operating agencies”—in other words, conventional telecoms operators. The ITU wants to change that to simply “operating agencies”. Were that to happen, not only would Google, Facebook and other website operators fall under the ITU’s jurisdiction, but so too would all government and business networks. It seems the stakes really are as high as the ITU’s critics have long maintained