Google CEO Eric Schmidt attended a Search Engine Strategies during which he approached the AOL subject.

“We have systems in place that won’t allow it to happen”, “Our No. 1 priority is the trust our users have, and that would be a violation of trust, so the answer is that would not happen.” said Eric.

“We are reasonably satisfied…that this kind of thing could not happen at Google,” before adding, “Never say never.”

Monday, AOL apologized to their users for releasing the logs, logs which were intended for their new research site. Even if their data was anonymous, journalists managed to trace a few of those people thanks to their own searches. More, what everyone does on the Internet should be confidential and not made public.

“Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to release the data,” Schmidt said in the conference session. “There are many things inside our company that we don’t share…starting with user queries…I always thought it was fertile ground for the government to snoop.”

The chief executive complained about Web sites that publish sensitive data, such as anti-abortion sites that reveal addresses for clinics and doctors. “Google is simply an aggregator of information, and the people who publish that information better have a good reason for publishing it,” he said.

If you know or not, Google [1] owns 5% in AOL so Schimdt commented: “I don’t want to criticize AOL. They’re a good partner of ours,” he said.

In the end, Google stated that they consider privacy a very important thing so this is why they fought the decision to release data to the government and the police. They managed to restrict the data that will be provided to the authorities.