Bloomberg
Google Facing Heat And New Legal Troubles With Street View Data In Europe
Google Inc., the owner of the world’s largest search engine, was asked by Germany to provide details by May 26 on data it erroneously gathered for the Street View mapping service, deepening its European woes.
“We need to see the used software to understand what was really saved,” Johannes Caspar, the data-protection commissioner of Hamburg, said in an interview.
German regulators are investigating how cars Google employed to drive around taking pictures for Street View ended up with private data from Wi-Fi networks that weren’t password- protected. Google said yesterday it deleted data mistakenly gathered from Wi-Fi networks in Ireland and was reaching out to do the same in other countries.
The Mountain View, California-based company is increasingly colliding with Europe’s data regulators who say it is neglecting privacy as it introduces features such as Google Buzz and Street View. Google, which has 79 percent of the search-engine market in Europe, will likely face further scrutiny and restrictions on the continent.
“I would expect market regulators to scrutinize Google more the bigger it gets and I think Google could put up a good fight,” said Alexander Wisch, a media analyst at Standard & Poor’s Equity Research in London.
Officials from 30 European countries last week said they want Google to further improve blurring techniques used to disguise images in Street View and consider manually tweaking images where faces or license plates can be recognized.
‘Privacy-Centric’
Google Chief Executive Officer Eric Schmidt said personal data the company erroneously gathered for Street View was not used in any way. Speaking at a conference outside London today, he said Google negotiates “hard” with governments on privacy issues. It has the most “privacy-centric” policy, he said.
“As a society we haven’t figured out what we want to do with all this new technology and what’s appropriate,” Schmidt said. “Societies will determine the outcomes differently.”
The European Union has been critical of Google.
“It is not acceptable that a company operating in the EU does not respect EU rules,” European Union Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding said in an e-mail to Bloomberg News. Reding told Google co-founder Larry Page in a meeting last June that “Google’s activities in the different EU member states related to Street View are subject to the control of the national data protection authorities.”
Page said today that the focus of regulators should be on harm done rather than on the potential for it. He said there was no actual harm resulting from the company’s policies.
European Troubles
“Google made a mistake, but they disclosed it,” said Massimiliano Trovato, a media and telecommunications regulations expert at the Bruno Leoni Institute in Milan. “They’re working with privacy regulators in the countries involved and, most importantly, they haven’t used the data collected.”
Concern about Google’s data-collection is among many run- ins the company has had with authorities in Europe.
In February, three Google employees were sentenced to six- month terms by an Italian court, which found them guilty of privacy violations. The case stemmed from a video clip that was uploaded to Google Video in 2006, which showed a group of school students bullying an autistic classmate.
A Paris court in December found Google’s book-scanning project violated some publishers’ and authors’ copyrights.
Germany’s Caspar said he plans more meetings with Google this week, including talks about a tool on Street View that would allow users to reject pictures of their property. Caspar is leading the probe because Google’s country headquarters are in Hamburg.
Other Conflicts
In a separate e-mailed statement today, he said, “The people responsible at Google have to use this case as an opportunity to once again adjust company policy toward a more transparent management of data protection.”
A Google spokeswoman based in London said the company’s priority is to delete data mistakenly collected in “the quickest and safest way.”
Caspar asked that Google not entirely delete all the information it has inadvertently collected since that will make any legal assessment difficult. “The data should be immediately removed from the operating business and only be used for clarification,” he said.
In the U.S., Google Buzz, a service introduced in February that lets people share photos and comments, created an outcry after it pulled users’ contacts from Google Gmail accounts automatically and displayed them to others.
Google is being sued in a California court over the service, after a letter sent to federal antitrust authorities in March by 10 members of Congress.
“I tend to feel some of these things are teething problems, but still Google could end up being restricted over some of the things they do,” said Sam Hart, a media analyst at Charles Stanley in London.
