[Philip Lelyveld note: this doesn't mean they can't do the research, just that they can't do it with Google money.]
Stanford’s Center for Internet and Society has long been generously funded by Google, but the center’s privacy research has proved damaging to the search giant in the past two years. Two years ago a researcher at the center helped uncover Google privacy violations that led to the company paying arecord $22.5 million fine.
Google also funds privacy research at other universities including Princeton and Harvard.
"Some of the best copyright scholarship of recent decades ... couldn't have been carried out at the Stanford CIS under the terms of the grant you described to me," Grimmelmann said. "So a commandment that ‘Thou Shalt Not Study X’ also interferes with the study of the rest of the alphabet."
See the full story here; http://mashable.com/2014/09/23/stanford-google-privacy-research/?curator=MediaREDEF