A San Francisco administrative law judge has ruled partly in favor of Google Inc. in a long-standing data struggle with the U.S. Department of Labor, granting the Mountain View-based company some protection from a deep data probe for employee compensation, salary history and contact information.

Administrative Law Judge Steven Berlin, who is presiding over the complaint, described the Labor Department's continued data requests as “over-broad, intrusive on employee privacy, unduly burdensome and insufficiently focused on obtaining the relevant information.” But Berlin did order Google to comply with limited parts of the government's prior data requests.

Berlin's order, filed July 14, puts a roadblock in the Labor Department's efforts to suss out what one solicitor called “evidence of very significant discrimination against women in the most common positions at Google headquarters.”