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.”