Critics of Google Antitrust Ruling Fault the Focus

originally appeared in The New York Times:

One of the more surprising conclusions drawn by the Federal Trade Commission when it dropped its nearly two-year antitrust investigation into Google last week was that Google, far from harming consumers, had actually helped them.

But some critics of the inquiry now contend that the commission found no harm in Google’s actions because it was looking at the wrong thing.

Instead of considering harm to people who come to Google to search for information, Google’s competitors and their supporters say that the government should have been looking at whether Google’s actions harmed its real customers — the companies that pay billions of dollars each year to advertise on Google’s site.

In its reports, the F.T.C. did not detail how it defined harm or what quantitative measures it had used to determine that Google users were better off.

But interviews with people on all sides of the investigation — government officials, Google supporters, advocates for Microsoft and other competitors, and antitrust experts and economists — show that many of the yardsticks the commission used to measure its outcomes were remarkably similar to Google’s own. Not surprisingly, they cast Google in a favorable light.

At issue were changes that Google made in recent years to its popular search page. Google makes frequent adjustments to the formulas that determine what results are generated when a user enters a search. Currently, it makes more than 500 changes a year, or more than one each day.

Users rarely notice the changes in the formulas, or algorithms, that generate search results, but businesses do. If a change in the formulas causes a business to rank lower in the order of results generated by a search, it is likely to miss potential customers.

What customers are now seeing reflects changes in the format of Google results. For certain categories of searches — travel information, shopping comparisons and financial data, for example — Google has begun presenting links to its own related services.

People close to the investigation said that Google had presented the F.T.C. with the results of tests with focus groups hired by an outside firm to review different versions of a Google search results page. After Google acquired ITA, a travel search business, in 2011, it began testing a new way to display flight results.

The company asked test users to compare side-by-side examples of a results page with just the familiar 10 blue links to specialty travel sites with a page that had at the top a box containing direct links to airlines and fares.

People who reviewed the Google data said tests with hundreds of people showed that fewer than one in five users preferred the page with links only. Users said they liked the box of flight results, so Google reasoned that making the change was better for the consumer.

There is a deep science to search evaluation, according to a senior vice president who oversees Google’s search operation, said in an interview on Friday. A lot of work goes into every change we make.

But the changes were not better for companies or alternative travel sites that were pushed off the first page of results by Google’s flight box and associated links. By pushing links to competing sites lower, Google might be making things easier for people who come to it for free search. But it also is having a negative effect on competitors, shutting off traffic for those sites.

Drawing fewer customers as a result of Google’s free links, those competitors are forced to advertise more to draw traffic. And advertisers who aren’t competitors have fewer places to go to reach consumers, meaning Google can use its market power to raise advertising prices.

There might be no consumer harm if Google eliminates Yelp, said one Microsoft advocate, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the likelihood of further interactions with the F.T.C. But advertisers certainly are harmed.

Google’s suggestion that the correct way to measure the benefit of a design change was through user appreciation seemed to strike a chord with the commission. In its statement explaining why it took no action against Google on search bias, the F.T.C. said that the documents, testimony and qualitative evidence the commission examined are largely consistent with the conclusion that Google likely benefited consumers by prominently displaying its vertical content on its search results page.

F.T.C. officials said they considered data from a wide range of sources — those with interests aligned with Google as well as against it. The officials also bought quantitative data about Internet usage and conducted interviews with experts who were independent of all sides.

None of the data was taken strictly at face value, according to the director of the F.T.C.’s Bureau of Economics, said in an interview. We kick the tires hard on all of the data we receive.

While some of Google’s competitors might have suffered when Google made changes to the way it generated and displayed search results, the F.T.C. said, the totality of the evidence showed that any negative impact on actual or potential competitors was incidental.

The five commissioners at the F.T.C. voted unanimously not to pursue a case accusing Google of using unfair competition to enhance its search business. One of those commissioners, however, warned that there was little to prevent Google from misrepresenting the value of the changes it made to its search methods.

That commissioner, a Republican who criticized the F.T.C.’s decision not to seek a court order preventing Google from certain actions, said, Nothing in this ‘settlement’ prevents Google from telling ‘half truths’ — for example, that its gathering of information about the characteristics of a consumer is done solely for the consumer’s benefit, instead of also to maintain a monopoly or near monopoly position.

Google’s interest in maintaining its market dominance — it accounts for about 70 percent of all searches in the United States — goes beyond its dedication to improving the experience for users, of course.

The F.T.C. chairman, said that while some evidence suggested that Google was trying to eliminate competition, that was not necessarily illegal. Some may believe the commission should have done more in this case, because they are locked in hand-to-hand combat with Google around the world and have the mistaken belief that criticizing us will influence the outcome in other jurisdictions, he said.

The commissioners also appeared to view Google’s changes to its results pages as a design issue as much as an antitrust one. Product design is an important dimension of competition, the commission wrote, and condemning legitimate product improvements risks harming consumers.

In Google Patent Case, F.T.C. Set Rules of Engagement for Battles

originally appeared in The New York Times:

The Federal Trade Commission’s antitrust investigation of Google focused mainly on the company’s lucrative search business, while its inquiry into the tech giant’s handling of patents seemed an afterthought.

Yet even as Google made only a few voluntary promises on search, it agreed to a legal settlement on patents that the commission chairman, called a landmark enforcement action that applies to huge high-tech markets like smartphones and tablet computers.

The commission action by no means spells the end of the smartphone patent wars, a global conflict in which major corporations including Apple, Samsung and Google have spent billions amassing patent portfolios and then suing and countersuing one another in courts around the world. But legal experts say Google’s settlement with the F.T.C. signals progress in clarifying the rules of engagement in high-tech patent battles, and thus could ease them.

The agreement represents a significant stride forward in reducing the confusion and uncertainty that currently surrounds how these patents can be used, according to a patent expert at the Santa Clara University School of Law.

The commission’s settlement with Google, announced on Thursday, focused on patents covering communications and data transmission technologies that are crucial for the basic operation of smartphones and tablets — what are known as standard-essential patents. (There are many other patents in mobile devices, covering physical design and software features.) The legal gamesmanship of the epic smartphone patent battles, according to economists and technology experts, consumes time and investment that could be better used to develop new products. In his comments on Thursday, the commission chairman pointed to those concerns. Today’s commission action, he said, will also relieve companies of some of the costly and inefficient burden of hoarding patents for purely defensive purposes, savings that we hope can be invested in job-creating research and development.

Under the settlement, Google agreed to license its standard-essential patents to other companies on “fair and reasonable” terms. It also agreed not to seek court injunctions to halt the shipment of smartphones, tablets and other devices that use its standard patents.

The issue arose from Google’s $12.5 billion purchase of Motorola Mobility, announced in 2011 and completed last year. Google acquired Motorola partly to defend itself and the smartphone makers that use its Android software after rivals had already loaded up on patents.

With the acquisition, Google picked up 17,000 patents, including many relating to wireless devices that Motorola, a pioneer in the wireless phone business, had pledged to license on reasonable terms. Those commitments were made to technology standards organizations, intended to assure that basic technical innovations are widely available, stimulating growth in the industry.

Over the years, according to the commission chairman, companies took Motorola at its word and developed products assuming they could routinely license Motorola’s patents. But Motorola later refused to license its standard-essential patents and sought court injunctions to stop shipment of rival products.

After Google purchased Motorola, he said, it continued these same abusive practices.

In recent months, the F.T.C. has issued position papers and filed friend-of-the-court briefs, opposing the motions for injunctions using standard patents. The Justice Department and European regulators have echoed the commission’s stance.

Regulators around the world have become increasingly sensitive to just how important technical standards and standards-setting bodies are to the modern system of economic innovation, according to an economist at Harvard Business School.

The threat of court injunctions to stop shipment of products, economists say, is the factor that drives up the cost of patent wars. Because an injunction could be devastating, companies will pay dearly to remove that risk, settling with a plaintiff or spending on patents to build a defensive arsenal.

Some courts have recently resisted granting injunctions based on standard patents. Google’s settlement with the F.T.C., according to a former chief economist in the Justice Department’s antitrust division, helps solidify the move to stop injunctions in standard-essential patent cases, which is great.

A professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that courts had also been more hesitant recently to grant injunctions in cases that did not involve standard patents. In suits involving smartphones and tablets — amalgams of hardware, software and telecommunications technologies covered by many thousands of patents — judges are sometimes less likely to halt the shipment of a device based on a few infringing patents.

Last month, for example, a Federal District Court judge in San Jose, Calif., denied Apple’s motion for an injunction against Samsung products. In August, a jury in that court found that Samsung products infringed on a handful of Apple design and software patents, and awarded Apple $1.05 billion in damages.

The judge declined to grant Apple’s motion for injunction, essentially saying that Apple’s claim was outweighed by the public interest in keeping Samsung shipments flowing. Apple is appealing the ruling.

The courts seem to be moving toward taking a dimmer view of injunctions generally, he said. That’s a big deal.

Google Pushed Hard Behind the Scenes to Convince Regulators

originally appeared in The New York Times:


For 19 months, Google pressed its case with antitrust regulators investigating the company. Working relentlessly behind the scenes, executives made frequent flights to Washington, laying out their legal arguments and shrewdly applying lessons learned from Microsoft’s bruising antitrust battle in the 1990s.

After regulators had pored over nine million documents, listened to complaints from disgruntled competitors and took sworn testimony from Google executives, the government concluded that the law was on Google’s side. At the end of the day, they said, consumers had been largely unharmed.


That is why one of the biggest antitrust investigations of an American company in years ended with a slap on the wrist Thursday, when the Federal Trade Commission closed its investigation of Google’s search practices without bringing a complaint. Google voluntarily made two minor concessions.

The way they managed to escape it is through a barrage of not only political officials but also academics aligned against doing very much in this particular case, according to a professor of antitrust law at the University of Iowa who has worked as a paid adviser to Google in the past. The first sign of a bad antitrust case is lack of consumer harm, and there just was not any consumer harm emerging in this very long investigation.

The F.T.C. had put serious effort into its investigation of Google. The agency’s chairman, has long advocated for the commission to flex its muscle as an enforcer of antitrust laws, and the commission had hired high-powered consultants, including an experienced litigator, and a well-known economist.

Still, the litigator said during a news conference announcing the result of the inquiry, the evidence showed that Google doesn’t violate American antitrust laws.

The conclusion is clear: Google’s services are good for users and good for competition, Google’s chief legal officer, wrote in a company blog post.

The main thrust of the investigation was into how Google’s search results had changed since it expanded into new search verticals, like local business listings and comparison shopping. A search for pizza or jeans, for instance, now shows results with photos and maps from Google’s own local business service and its shopping product more prominently than links to other Web sites, which has enraged competing sites.

But while the F.T.C. said that Google’s actions might have hurt individual competitors, over all it found that the search engine helped consumers, as evidenced by Google users’ clicking on the products that Google highlighted and competing search engines’ adopting similar approaches.

Google outlined these kinds of arguments to regulators in many meetings over the last two years, as it has intensified its courtship of Washington, with Google executives at the highest levels, as well as lawyers, lobbyists and engineers appearing in the capital.

One of the arguments they made, according to people briefed on the discussions, was that technology is such a fast-moving industry that regulatory burdens would hinder its evolution. Google makes about 500 changes to its search algorithm each year, so results look different now than they did even six months ago.

The definition of competition in the tech industry is also different and constantly changing, Google argued.

For instance, just recently Amazon and Apple, which used to be in different businesses than Google, have become its competitors. Google’s share of the search market has stayed at about two-thirds even though competing search engines are “just a click away,” as the company repeatedly argued. That would become the company’s mantra to demonstrate that it was not abusing its market power.

To underline these arguments, Google spent $13.1 million on lobbying in the first three quarters in 2012, up from $5.9 million in the same period in 2011. And Google’s lobbyist in chief, Eric E. Schmidt, the company’s executive chairman and former chief executive, has made himself a Washington insider as a close adviser to President Obama.

Then there were the lessons of the Microsoft case.

Google had the Microsoft case as a template, according to an associate professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. Google just had to convince the regulators it was sufficiently different from Microsoft.

One lesson for Google executives was to play nicely with the regulators. Microsoft’s executives were known for their uncooperative demeanors during their tangle with the government. But even Mr. Schmidt, known for speaking candidly, was on his best behavior.

Google, and its lawyers and hired experts, also argued forcefully that this case was different than the one against Microsoft. For one, they pointed out again, the technology world is so different. At the time of the Microsoft inquiry, its software was the main on-ramp to the Internet.

Search today is not a bottleneck monopoly for anything, according to an economics professor at Stanford who studies competition in computing and has worked as a paid expert for Google recently and for Microsoft in the past.

That’s not the same as everyone who wants to do mass market computing has to go through Google, like back then everyone who wanted to do mass market computing had to go through Microsoft, he added.

Microsoft, leading a chorus of unsatisfied Google competitors, said Thursday that it was disappointed in the F.T.C.’s decision.

In a blog post published Thursday night, a Microsoft vice president and deputy general counsel, called the decision a missed opportunity. The F.T.C.’s overall resolution of this matter is weak and — frankly — unusual, he wrote. We are concerned that the F.T.C. may not have obtained adequate relief even on the few subjects that Google has agreed to address.

The VP/General Counsel added that Microsoft remained hopeful that other antitrust agencies, including those in Europe, would take more forceful action against Google.

Harsh criticism of the decision also came from an experienced Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer who represents a collection of Internet companies that complained to the F.T.C. about Google’s behavior.

I’ve been doing this almost 40 years, been involved in scores of antitrust investigations, he said. I’ve never seen anything so incomplete and lacking and even incompetent as what happened here.

The director of the F.T.C.’s bureau of competition, dismissed the lawyer’s comment as silly.

This was a very thorough, very professional investigation performed by very diligent and dedicated staff, he said.

Regulators had anticipated criticism from Google’s rivals and tried to answer the complaints in their news conference.

Some believe the commission should have done more in this case, perhaps because they are locked in a hand in hand combat with Google around the world, according to their attorney. But, he said, We really do follow the facts where they lead. He added, The focus of our law is on protecting competition, not competitors.

A law professor at Columbia who was a senior adviser to the F.T.C. until last summer, said the outcome of the Google case reflected a change in thinking about antitrust enforcement. It used to be like the way we dealt with the mob, he said, who was involved in the agency’s Google inquiry but who emphasized that he was not speaking for the F.T.C.

I don’t believe it’s the position of antitrust agencies to invent competition where there isn’t any, he said. People like Google better than Bing. Microsoft is trying to do everything it can to change that, but people still seem to prefer Google.

Still, some veterans of the technology industry said that even though the agency did not find an antitrust violation, it still was sending a message to Google that it was not off the hook for good.

There’s a long track record of government never really going away, according to a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University and a former chief technology for the Federal Communications Commission who testified as a government witness in the Microsoft case. They will come back.

Child Web Privacy Law Gets Updated

originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal:

In a move to update rules governing children's privacy online to cover new areas like smartphones, U.S. regulators broadened decade-old policies, but amid pressure from the technology industry backed away from proposals that could have made companies like Facebook Inc. and Apple Inc. more responsible for violations.

The Federal Trade Commission said it would change how it implements the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act of 1998, or Coppa, to reflect the growth of social networks and smartphone apps among children.

The commission also expanded the types of information it considers personal under the law. Kids' apps and websites will now have to obtain parental consent before gathering photos, videos or geographic location, and before tracking kids' online behavior and passing along the data to other companies.

But in a departure from rule changes the government proposed in August, the FTC explicitly exempted app stores like those run by Apple and Google Inc. from responsibility for privacy violations by the games and other software that are sold there.

The updated rules, which go into effect July 1, also make clear that software such as Facebook's "Like" button and ads placed by advertising networks will only have to meet child online privacy regulations if companies have "actual knowledge" that they're collecting information through a website or app that targets kids.

The commission's move ended one chapter in the long-running Washington debate over how closely the government should regulate online privacy, but set the stage for new battles.

Consumer advocates said they would continue their push to make Apple and Google more responsible for the data-gathering practices of the apps they distribute, while several members of Congress are pushing legislation to further tighten limits on online tracking of children and teenagers.

Just last week, the FTC put a spotlight on gaps in kids' online privacy with a report that found hundreds of popular kids' apps were collecting data without parental consent.

Coppa governs how companies must proceed when collecting personal data from children under the age of 13. Enforcement falls to the FTC, which has been reviewing how it should approach the law in the age of smartphones and social media for two years. Kids' entertainment and Internet companies have lobbied heavily to blunt the impact of the update.

Apple, for example, met with FTC officials five times this fall, in particular contesting the possibility that the updated rules might hold it responsible for the data-collection practices of the third-party apps it distributes on the iPhone and iPad. Google made a similar point in a filing with the commission.

Google said it was evaluating the changes and would continue to work on effective ways to protect children's privacy and security. Facebook said it was pleased with the FTC's decision on so-called plug-ins, such as the "Like" button.

In several cases, the industry got what it wanted. Reversing a prior proposal, the commission agreed to continue to allow parental consent to be obtained by email as long as apps and websites only collect data for internal use.

The FTC's Chairman said the final rules strike the right balance between protecting innovation that will provide rich and engaging content for children, and ensuring that parents are informed and involved in their children's online activities.

While Apple, Google and Facebook scored partial victories, some smaller developers were disappointed. The president of the Application Developers Alliance, said that the new regulations could prove so burdensome that talented and responsible developers will abandon the children's app marketplace.

One FTC commissioner voted against the updated rules. She argued the commission went too far with the update by holding websites responsible when third parties like advertising networks gather personal data from children.

But some government officials made clear Wednesday they would like to place additional regulations on technology companies. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D., W.Va.), a leading advocate on privacy issues, said he viewed the Coppa regulations as a step toward legislation that gives Americans more control of how they are tracked online.

The executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy and a consumer advocate who has been involved in the Coppa debate for years, said the FTC's decision was a step in the right direction but left loopholes for companies to mine kids' data inappropriately.

He said he would continue to push for more scrutiny of the role of the Internet giants that distribute kids' apps.

The FTC's chairman has made monitoring online privacy one of his priorities at the commission. At Wednesday's news conference announcing the revised rules, he repeatedly held up what he said was his 15-year-old daughter's white iPhone to illustrate how much technology has changed in the past decade.

It was enormously difficult for me to pry this away from my child today, he said.

Google Under Investigation by FTC

The Google Inc. co-founders are slated for questioning by U.S. antitrust regulators and hired a top Washington law firm to help them prepare for their interviews, two people familiar with the matter said.

The Google executives retained Williams & Connolly LLP, the Washington law firm that has represented President Bill Clinton, former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and the late Senator Edward Kennedy, as counsel for the depositions, said the people, who didn’t want to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about the matter. They didn’t know when the interviews are scheduled to take place.

The Google Chairman was questioned by the FTC June 5, another person familiar with the matter said.

Plans for the depositions come as the Federal Trade Commission speeds up its antitrust probe of operator of the world’s most popular Internet search engine. The agency’s chairman, said June 6 that he expects to complete the investigation by the end of the year. The FTC will then decide whether to sue Google.

Google disclosed on June 24 that the FTC had begun a review of its business practices. The FTC is focusing on whether Google unfairly ranks search results to favor its own businesses and increases advertising rates for competitors, people familiar with the investigation have said.

Answer Questions

Google states that they are happy to explain our business to regulators and answer any questions they may have.

In April, the FTC hired a Washington litigator to run the antitrust investigation, signaling that the agency may be building a case against Google.

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FTC Has Lunch with Google Exec

Story first appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek.

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission Chairman took time away from a Southern California technology conference to dine with a senior executive at Google Inc., the subject of an intensifying government antitrust probe.

The FTC chairman had lunch yesterday with Google’s senior vice president of advertising, at Catalina Kitchen at the Terranea Resort in Rancho Palos Verdes. The pair were attending the D10 conference, put on by technology blog AllThingsD.

Google's senior VP of advertising spearheaded Google’s $3.1 billion acquisition of DoubleClick Inc., an Internet-advertising company, and was involved in Google’s purchase of AdMob Inc., which specializes in mobile ads. Google’s advertising practices are part of the FTC’s antitrust investigation.

The agency is examining whether the company unfairly increases ad rates for competitors, people familiar with the matter have said. FTC officials have also asked rival shopping and review websites whether Google sells them prime advertising space on search results pages, people with knowledge of the matter said earlier this month.

The FTC is seeking to determine whether Google is using its dominance to thwart competition among Internet companies. Google was used in 67 percent of U.S. searches in April, according to ComScore Inc., a Reston, Virginia-based market researcher.

There are certainly allegations that the search results have changed or evolved over the years. The FTC is trying to figure out if the evidence is there and what the theories are.

Investigation Intensifies

In a separate interview yesterday with Bloomberg, Leibowitz said he recently held meetings with executives at Square Inc., Reputation.com Inc., Zynga Inc. and Mozilla Corp. to discuss online privacy.

It’s valuable to keep lines of communication open” with leaders in the technology industry.

The investigation of Mountain View, California-based Google has intensified in recent weeks as agency lawyers prepare to question the company’s chairman and its chief defender against antitrust charges.

The agency in April hired a top Washington litigator, to run the antitrust investigation. The FTC CHairman states that when presented the opportunity to get someone of her stature and abilities, you would always want to take her up on it. It doesn’t mean that we’ve decided to bring a case at all, it just means that we have very competent counsel who can go toe-to-toe with Google's very competent counsel.

Google Shopping

Google said in a blog post yesterday that it’s starting a product-search service Google Shopping and will require retailers to pay for inclusion in the listings. Google rivals have criticized the company for giving preference to Google product listings in search results.
The charges to manufacturers and retailers represent a change in Google’s practices, an Internet search analyst, said in a column this week on the Marketing Land blog. In its 2004 initial public offering letter, Google said the company wouldn’t accept payment for including specific search results.

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Google In A Pinch Again

Story first appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek.
Google Inc. is negotiating with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over how big a fine it will have to pay for its breach of Apple Inc.’s Safari Internet browser.

The fine could amount to more than $10 million dollars. The fine would be the first by the FTC for a violation of Internet privacy as the agency steps up enforcement of consumers’ online rights.

The FTC is preparing to allege that Mountain View, California-based Google deceived consumers and violated terms of a consent decree signed with the commission last year when it planted so-called cookies on Safari, bypassing Apple software’s privacy settings. Google states that they will cooperate with any officials who have questions.

The cookies allowed Google to bypass Safari’s built-in privacy protections to aim targeted advertising at users of Safari on computers, laptops, iPhones and iPads. Google said at the time that it didn’t anticipate this would happen and that it was removing the files since discovering the slip.

The Safari breach was first identified by a Stanford researcher, who published a blog entry on his discoveries Feb. 16. ‘Unfair and Deceptive’

The FTC is charged with protecting consumers against “unfair and deceptive” practices under the law that created the agency. European regulators are probing Google more broadly on its privacy policy and sent a detailed questionnaire to the company in March.

Google signed a consent decree with the FTC last year in which it settled allegations it used deceptive tactics and violated its own privacy policies in introducing the Buzz social-networking service in 2010. The 20-year settlement bars Google from misrepresenting how it handles user information, and requires the company to follow policies that protect consumer data in new products and to submit to regular privacy audits.

The FTC has the authority to levy fines for violations of its consent decrees of as much as $16,000 a day for each violation.

First-Quarter Revenue

Google, the world’s largest Internet search company, on April 12 reported first-quarter revenue of $8.14 billion, excluding sales passed on to partner sites. Profit before certain costs was $10.08 a share.

The agency issued its largest fine in a privacy-related case against data broker ChoicePoint Inc. in 2006 for compromises of personal financial records of more than 163,000 consumers. ChoicePoint agreed to pay $10 million in civil penalties and $5 million in consumer redress in a settlement with the FTC.

Google is quickly becoming the privacy problem child for regulators in the U.S. and Europe. The Center for Digital Democracy has urged regulators to review the handling of consumer data by companies including Google, Facebook Inc. and Top SEO Companies. The Commission’s work to enforce its consent decree with Google shows there’s a real regulatory cop on the digital beat.


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FTC: No fine in Google Street View Wi-Fi Probe

cNet

Google won't face any fines from U.S. regulators over its accidental Street View Wi-Fi data collection.

The Federal Trade Commission sent a letter to the search company today, saying that because Google has made improvements to its internal privacy practices, including a formal review process, it would not pursue the matter further.

"Because of these commitments, we are ending our inquiry into this matter at this time," wrote David Vladeck, director of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection.

In May, Google said that because of a programming error, its Street View cars had intercepted fragments of data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks for periods of 200 milliseconds at a time. An investigation by the Canadian government showed that the about 12 Blu-ray discs' worth of Wi-Fi transmissions worldwide were collected after an unnamed Google engineer failed to follow company procedures--by not sending design specifications for Street View code to the company's legal department for review.

Google acknowledged last week that, in some cases, it collected e-mail messages and passwords. There is no evidence the data was ever misused or used for any purpose except Google seo. The company has no plans to resume using its Street View cars to collect information about the locations of Wi-Fi networks.

Vladeck's letter said that Google "should develop and implement reasonable procedures" to "identify risks to consumer privacy."

In a blog post on October 22, Google outlined the steps it was taking to improve its privacy practices, including appointing computer scientist Alma Whitten as a director of privacy, and better training and legal compliance.

Some other privacy commissioners continue to investigate Street View.

Google has issued this statement: "We welcome the news that the FTC has closed its inquiry and recognized the steps we have taken to improve our internal controls. As we've said before and as we've assured the FTC, we did not want and have never used the payload data in any of our products or services." And while I'm at it, in case there's any confusion, the investigations aren't targeting Street-View-the-mapping-product. Instead, the agencies have been looking into how Google's cars that did the mapping separately collected fragments of unencrypted Wi-Fi transmissions.

Lawmaker seeks Cooperation from Google, Facebook
Associated Press

The head of the House Judiciary Committee is asking Google Inc. and Facebook to cooperate with any government inquiries into privacy practices at both companies.

Michigan Democrat John Conyers sent letters to Google and Facebook on Friday amid mounting concern in Congress that the two online companies are not adequately protecting personal privacy on the Internet.

Facebook has come under fire for sharing user information with a handful of other online services as part of its new "instant personalization" program, which is intended to let Facebook members share their interests in everything from music to restaurants with others in their social network. The program draws information from a member's profile to customize several other sites, including the music service Pandora.

Facebook simplified its privacy controls this week in response to the backlash among users. As part of the changes, it added a tool to make it easier for members to turn off the instant personalization service.

Conyers asked Facebook on Friday to provide details about its sharing of member information with third parties and about its privacy policies. Several privacy watchdog groups, including the Electronic Privacy Information Center, have already filed a complaint against Facebook with the Federal Trade Commission. The FTC has been reviewing the privacy policies of Facebook and other social networks.

Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said the company looks forward to meeting with Conyers' staff to explain its privacy practices and policies.

Conyers stopped short of saying the Judiciary Committee will begin its own investigations into Facebook and Google.

Google recently admitted that it had sucked up fragments of e-mails, Web surfing behavior and other online activities over public Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries while it was photographing neighborhoods for its "Street View" mapping feature. The company said it discovered the problem following an inquiry by German regulators.

Conyers is asking Google to retain the data collected by its Street View cars along with related records until any federal and state inquiries are complete. At least two House members, Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, and Rep. Edward Markey, D-Mass., have already asked the FTC to look into the matter and are seeking more information from Google about the incident.

Google already has hired a security consulting firm, iSEC partners, to make an encrypted copy of all the U.S. data collected by Street View to ensure the information is preserved, according to records in a federal lawsuit filed against the company in Portland, Ore. The judge overseeing that case has ordered Google to retain the data.

The FTC has yet to say whether it is investigating Google.