Google and the 'Israeli blog damage control operation'

The words 'Google', 'personal information' and 'privacy' are a bit like tindersticks to a technology news wildfire.

It was no surprise then, that when a relatively obscure Israeli business news website reported that Google had 'handed over' information about a blogger to a local council which was suing him for libel, news spread quickly, and creatively.

Today senior spokesmen for Google were forced to deny reports that the company had 'voluntarily' handed over the IP address of a blogger using the Google-owned Blogger service to council authorities in Sha'arei Tivka, a settlement in the West Bank.

The story, they said, was "factually inaccurate" - but not before tech news sites had picked it up anyway, and sent their readers into a lathery wave of 'Is our information really safe with Google?'-type commentaries.

The news broke early yesterday afternoon on the Globes Online website, which reported that Google had "agreed to supply" the IP address of an blogger using its service to councillors in Sha'arei Tivka after he or she had allegedly libelled them.

The article said that the council members had "reached an agreement" with Google "based on an Israeli (court) ruling on the subject," whereby a message would be posted on the blog summoning the writer to the hearing. If he or she didn't attend, the IP address would be handed over.

In Globes Online's words, Google had "taken a hint" after the judge presiding over the case in Rishon LeZion, a city near Tel Aviv, said that the blog's content "raised suspicions of criminal conduct."

In a later report on a widely read tech site this became: "Google had provided the IP address of an anonymous blogger voluntarily as part of a defamation case." The report compared the case to the "now infamous Yahoo!/China case," but said that in this instance, Google had not been ordered to hand over the information, and had instead supplied it directly to the councillors who requested it.

(In fact Globes Online's story had pointed out - in the second last paragraph - that Google was compelled to act by the court, as did a report in an Israeli daily newspaper, Yediot Aharonot.)

But by then the backlash had begun. "Knowing some people in the Israeli underworld, I’d say the blogger’s life is now in definite peril. Shame on Google," read one comment on TechCrunch. Another said: "Google is the Microsoft of the web. "'Do no evil' [Google's motto] is crap."

Google was forced into damage control mode. In an e-mailed posted on CNET, another tech site, at about midnight last night - 11 hours after the story broke - it said that it had handed over the blogger's IP address after the court "had required it to do so."

A Google spokesman said that the company only ever gave information about its users to third parties when they had been through "the proper legal process," as had happened in this case.

Today the 'misinformation correction operation' continued. Google said that it had originally opposed the court's injunction, because it had wanted to "give the blogger a chance to explain in court why his or her IP address should not be disclosed" - a request to which the court agreed.

"As you can see," an e-mail from a Google spokesman - posted in full on the TechCrunch site - went on, "we did not just cave in at the first opportunity."