Schmidtlein is tearing into the government for not hammering out how to handle sensitive data before and during this hearing, and instead trying to kick it down the road for a decision later. “There’s an extraordinary amount of user data here,” and everyone “admits that it implicates privacy,” he says. Google previously argued that revealing search query data would undermine user trust, and he reiterates that search queries can reveal detail about individual people even if you try to remove personal identifying information. “We have a rough idea of a standard of privacy, but no idea about how to solve it,” he says. “It’s not even begun to be resolved.”