With the growth and development of the cyber world, cyber crimes are also increasing in the number, threatening the credibility of businesses and individuals on the World Wide Web. One such crime is the cyber defamation. In order to tackle such malicious content on individual and businesses, the cyber crime investigation agencies retrieve information regarding these culprits from the internet service providers such as Google. One of the first steps after these agencies take is they present Google with a subpoena request, in order to retrieve the personal information of the internet users that exists in Google’s servers. However, Google subpoena policy has made it difficult for some attorneys and litigation support teams to get their hands on the digital evidence that Google storage banks contain.

The internet giant Google has spent years building its reputation as the top internet service provider and has gained enough trust, support and following from the internet users from around the world. In order to protect its brand, and to maintain the respect from the internet users that it has earned, Google has devised a policy for maintaining the secrecy of the personal information of its subscribers. As a result, the Google subpoena policy has emerged. The basic purpose of this policy is to protect the data of its subscribers by limiting the information provided by Google to the criminal investigation authorities, or perhaps by even ignoring the subpoena requests.

According to their policy, Google needs the subpoena requests to be backed by the court orders so that the seriousness of the issue is confirmed. Once the lawsuit is filed against the responsible author/poster,  the victim’s attorney may approach Google for relevant digital evidence. Without a proper court order, Google does not consider subpoena requests. According to the Google subpoena policy, only a limited amount of information will be released to the victim’s attorney. Since Google promises its subscribers of maintaining the secrecy of the personal data of every user, as per its subpoena policy, Google will ignore the subpoena requests that demand a vast amount of data that may or may not be useful in the investigation of the crime.

The personal information of the internet users, who use Google’s services, is present at their ‘perishable servers’. These servers hold such data for an age of 6 to 12 months. As per Google subpoena policy, if a subpoena request asks for data that is more than 6 to 12 months old, the subpoena request will either be ignored, or will be responded with the reason due to which the request may not be fulfilled. Furthermore, Google won’t usually entertain the subpoena requests that come from places other than the state of California. Such policies by the internet giant do make the work of cyber crime investigation agencies, slightly difficult.

In a statement which they made regarding their subpoena policies, they have clearly mentioned the requirement of a valid legal process to back all subpoena requests. Unless your approach is as per Google subpoena policy, your subpoena request is unlikely to be entertained.