Google Admits Drive-By Data Collection Was Privacy Breach

[Hissyspit]

Source: New York Times

Google Admits Drive-By Data Collection Was Privacy Breach

By DAVID STREITFELD
Published: March 12, 2013 7 Comments

SAN FRANCISCO — Google on Tuesday acknowledged to state officials that it had violated people’s privacy during its Street View mapping project when it casually scooped up passwords, e-mail and other personal information from unsuspecting computer users.

In agreeing to settle a case brought by 38 states involving the project, the search company for the first time is required to aggressively police its own employees on privacy issues and to explicitly tell the public how to fend off privacy violations like this one.

While the settlement also included a tiny — for Google — fine of $7 million, privacy advocates and Google critics characterized the overall agreement as a breakthrough for a company they say has become a serial violator of privacy.

Complaints have led to multiple enforcement actions in recent years and a spate of worldwide investigations into the way the mapping project also collected the personal data of private computer users.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/13/technology/google-pays-fine-over-street-view-privacy-breach.html?_r=0

[leveymg]

1. Just part of the NSA's Total Information Program that escaped into the wild.

The information collectors make money off every person, every email, every purchase recorded and fit into a matrix with everyone else's; in the name of public safety and commerce, the government pays to have every city, street, and the floor plan of every house mapped out, every movement tracked and predicted, along with those of everyone we might know; and the big payoff comes when our every purchase, relationship, vote and criminal act is effectively planned out for us.

That path is now inevitable, unless the thing breaks. Or, is broken. Or just goes broke.

[wtmusic]

2. Google has a streak of voyeurism that's more than a bit creepy.

Yes, it is possible to overdo the information-is-power schtick. "All information is public" actually means that only the powerful's information is private.

[Paulie]

3. Fine should have been a penny per byte of data collected. nt

[loudsue]

5. Hear, hear! Quit letting powerful criminals off without any punishment.

I'm sick of the two legal systems in the USA.

[RILib]

4. fail

Google used to "not be evil." Those days are long gone.

They have no concept of privacy. Eric Schmidt was quoted as saying something like, If you're not doing anything wrong, you shouldn't care.

[Paul E Ester]

6. Still not clear why they needed to break the passwords on the wifi machines they scanned. It has

always made little sense to me. Is it explained anywhere?

[OnyxCollie]

7. I think they were picking up networks that weren't password-protected.

Somehow it's different than going through a parking lot, lifting every door handle, and stealing from all the unlocked cars.

Somehow.

[Paul E Ester]

8. They were open, the scanned passwords, traffic

But, the commission said, Google did not engage in illegal wiretapping because the data was flowing, unencrypted, over open radio waves.

The commission found that legal precedent — and engineer Milner’s invocation of the Fifth Amendment — meant Google was off the hook for wiretapping. The FCC agreed with Google that its actions did not amount to wiretapping because the unencrypted Wi-Fi signals were “readily accessible to the general public.”

According to the Wiretap Act, amended in 1986, it’s not considered wiretapping “to intercept or access an electronic communication made through an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public.”

But U.S. District Judge James Ware, a California federal judge presiding over about a dozen lawsuits accusing Google of wiretapping Americans, ruled last year that Google could be held liable for wiretapping damages.

Judge Ware said that the FCC interpretation did not apply to open, unencrypted Wi-Fi networks and instead applied only to “traditional radio services” like police scanners. The lawsuits have been stayed, pending the outcome of Google’s appeal.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/05/google-wifi-fcc-investigation/

[Xithras]

9. There's a more accurate example than that.

Google was mapping WiFi MAC addresses to physical locations. The project was intended to permit faster geolocation than GPS was capable of, by allowing mobile devices to determine their location by triangulating their positions based off of nearby known wifi services.

What Google did was the equivalent of walking through a parking lot taking photos of the VIN numbers on each cars dashboard with a wide angle lens. A lot of people are rather dumb and did the equivalent of leaving their credit cards, passwords, and other personal documents on their dashboards, so Googles camera captured many of those as well.

Some people will say that Google shouldn't have been recording VIN numbers without permission. Others will say that Google should have used more discretion and recorded NOTHING BUT the VIN numbers (VIN numbers are, after all, public identification numbers placed in a visible position so that anyone can read them, just like MAC addresses). Still others will say that the car owners in the parking lot were idiots for leaving their sensitive data out like that where anyone could wander by and look at it. At some level, all of them are right.