When a subpoena is served on Google webmail service, Gmail’s subpoena compliance obligations mean that Google has the duty to respond to the court motion. Indeed, a person or an institution on which the subpoena is served has a legal obligation to comply with an order of the court. In general, Google has a duty to comply with the court ruling and with the company’s internal policy regarding subpoenas’ compliance as well. As stipulated in the company’s legal disclosure policy, Google engages itself to comply with lawful and authorized processes seeking information on Google accounts. These processes include search warrants, subpoenas and court orders.

Gmail’s subpoena compliance implies that Google webmail service must provide all the information available and listed in the subpoena that includes: IP log information regarding records on every visit of the email account, email addresses used to register and other registration information regarding the Gmail account.

In keeping with Google privacy and legal disclosure policies, the company, like most websites, stores the information the users provide and the data that the server retrieves and collects in logs for a ‘perishable shelf life’ of six months. This information includes, for example:

• Cookies that are small files composed of characters that are sent to a computer when users visit a website.
• Log information that refers to a server log’s data such as internet protocol addresses, information on browsers’ languages and types, data and time websites were accessed and other information related to browsers and accounts.
• Users’’ communications that contain all personal, sensitive and non-personal data pertaining to emails, SMS messages, phone numbers, credit cards numbers, bank accounts numbers, chats and other communications in order to process users inquires.

Other information include: affiliated Google services on other sites, third party applications, location data and unique application number. All information is required to be deleted when a court order is issued and are released only when a subpoena is served on the provider.

In keeping with Gmail’s subpoena compliance policy, a victim of cyber fraudulent actions have the legal right to take legal actions against Google and perpetrators and request the court for a motion to obtain the perpetrator’s information from the internet service provider that supplied the IP address.

However, Gmail’s subpoena compliance raises various heightened issues about limits of privacy and confidentiality of information and subpoena compliance in other domains such as medicine, journalism and finance whereby many parties in litigation have been serving subpoenas on non-parties to get information. Subsequently, many institutions have been undertaking actions to squash these summonses.

Many testimonies unveiled that Google is, to some degree, collaborative. Subpoena compliance is regulated by some specific legal rules regarding the method and time for compliance. Usually, the summon is served minimum five days before the return date which means that the Google web service is given five days to compile all the subpoena Gmail records. However, in some instances, the Gmail’s subpoena compliance return time may be extended after agreement from the institution that issued summon. Such demands are usually made when the subpoena Gmail records to be produced in court are voluminous..