Today, a victory was won for privacy advocates and bloggers everywhere, as a school board member failed to convince New York State courts that Google should be required to hand over details about anonymous commenters on a Blogger blog.

Recently, a lot of flak has been tossed in a lot of different directions, much of it towards Google and Yahoo (but of course we can't forget Facebook) in regards to their various and often conflicting stances on privacy. Today, though, Google took a position on privacy that was commendable in that they refused to hand over anonymized data unless the person to whom the data belonged to consented to its release.

Marcy Friedman, the Supreme Court Justice presiding over the case, ultimately agreed, stating that a decision against Google would have a "chilling effect on protected speech."

The whole ordeal seems to be over anonymous comments on a blog post regarding how public funds should be dispersed. The original blog post is fairly straightforward, but the comments were accusations baseless and ad hominem. Those that have been on the internet for more than twenty minutes or so know that this is not out of the ordinary, and it reminds me of the immortal words from Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back: "The Internet is a communication tool used the world over where people can come together to [complain] about movies and share pornography with one another."

We wouldn't want to lose that, now would we?

[via WebProNews]