It can be just anonymised search history in this case.
> It can be just anonymised search history in this case.
Depending on the exact issues in the case, a court might allow that (more likely, it would allow only turning over anonymized data in discovery, if the issues were such that that there was no clear need for more) but generally the obligation to preserve evidence does not include the right to edit evidence or replace it with reduced-information substitutes.
We found that one was a bad idea in the earliest days of the web when AOL thought "what could the harm be?" about turning over anonymised search queries to researchers.
How did you go from a court order to persevere evidence and jump to dumping that data raw into the public record?
Courts have been dealing with discovery including secrets that litigants never want to go public for longer than AOL has existed.
That sounds impossible to do well enough without being accused of tampering with evidence.
Just erasing the userid isn’t enough to actually anonymize the data, and if you scrubbed location data and entities out of the logs you might have violated the court order.
Though it might be in our best interests as a society we should probably be honest about the risks of this tradeoff; anonymization isn’t some magic wand.