Germany Demands Google Forfeit Citizens' Wi-Fi Data

eldavojohn writes "Germany has ordered Google to give up hard disk drives used to store German data collected during their Street View operations in that country. This follows Google's admission last week (after prodding from the Germans) that it had collected the data from unsecured wireless area networks from around the entire world as its roving cars collected the photo archive for Street View. Google says they've offered to just destroy the data, in cooperation with national regulators, but the German government wants to know what they've collected. They do not think that destroying the drives suffices for compliance with the laws. Officials went so far as to say of the situation, 'It is not acceptable that a company operating in the EU does not respect EU rules.' Germany has certainly been keeping their eye on the search giant." The Ars coverage notes that the US FTC may be looking more closely at Google's collection as well.

Comments

Great News!

[e2d2]

Oh good. I was worried it would end up in the wrong hands.

Google isn't evil

[SigILL]

Google is actually doing a good thing: now I don't have to remember the password for my wireless network; any Android device can automatically look it up on Google's servers.

Thanks, Google!

Norm MacDonald

[Torodung]

Germany has certainly been keeping their eye on the search giant.

Or so the Germans would have us believe.

--
Toro

First time that shtick's ever been funny and accurate.

Re:Privacy laws

[Hognoxious]

Clearly Google just wants the MAC addresses to have as a GPS backup in the future...

Do you mean IP addresses? That would at least be believable. What good would a map of MAC addresses be?

Well said. Round here you get a static IP address for life (unless you move house), but are obliged to exchange your router every month via a government scheme that redistributes them randomly around the country.

Re:Privacy laws

[Hognoxious]

If you know where the WiFi is, you can look up the location of the WiFi via Google -- without a GPS.

I appear to be in the middle of NETGEAR, DLINK and linksys. So I'm in central Brussels, no, it's Montreal ... whoaaaa, now I'm in Johannesburg! I'm starting to get a bit of motion sickness now...