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Google Relents, Will Hand Over European Wi-Fi Data
itwbennett writes "Having previously denied demands from Germany that the company turn over hard drives with data it secretly collected from open wireless networks over the past three years, Google has reversed course. A Google representative said that it will hand over the data to German, French, and Spanish authorities within a matter of days, according to the Financial Times, which first reported this latest development on Wednesday. 'We screwed up. Let's be very clear about that,' Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the newspaper."
They're opening up a whole warehouse full of cans of worms by handing the data over to a government with plenty of agendas instead of destroying it.
Ok, so which is the screwup, not giving the data, or the giving up of data?
...so now people's personal data is now in the hands of the relevant governments. I'm not sure this helps the situation.
Only works if you can unsee said information.
Really i don't see a problem with what google did, apparently it was only open networks etc, having an open wireless device in your house would be like not having curtains on your windows, if your not going to "stop" people from looking in, you've got nothing to complain about. If they were only taking samples, there shouldn't be much of an issue, because you where broadcasting the data to the public anyway...
Simple: by recording everything without verifying whether said data should be record. Capturing everything is easier than implementing filters, especially if storage space is not an issue.
People kept their networks open, Google gathered some probably useless information about them - presumably no more than 15 seconds worth in most cases (because it's a car driving by). Google has far more information on far more people from saved web searches/e-mails/etc. I'm tired of seeing these stories, I really don't care.
If European Governments are actually pursuing this, shame on them.
The data is potentially evidence in upcoming court cases.
Yes, well, whether this is okay or not depends entirely on the court case, doesn't it? I think more than a few /.'ers are concerned that it may indeed be used for court cases, but not necessarily just cases against Google....
Usually that would mean sending someone to have a look and see and perhaps sample the data. It's how they go about our IRS equivalent, social services, workplace safety, and about any situation where the Gov't needs to inspect something. TFA says originally Hamburg wanted about that - access to a hard drive and to a Street View car; note the singular. However, now they are talking about giving "the data", not about letting the authorities inspect it. Too fuzzy for my liking.
Funny, by the way, how Google wondered about the legality of having its data inspected by the data protection authority. "We screwed up" is the only adequate and honest thing for them to say after that. It's not without merit, because what other big company would?
As incompetent as they are ( and I live in Germany), there are actually 2 possible options:
1 - The keep the data in somevaults until it is so outdated it's no use anyway
2 - They analyse the relevant harddrive then have them disposed, just to turn up together with all the data on Ebay a few weeks/months later
Never attribute to malice what can be achieved by pure idocy
Repeat after me: What the government wants, and what is right, are not synonymous. I would much rather a random thief have my diary, and then destroy it, than for the government to ever lay their filthy paws on it.
"It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." - C.S. Lewis
Funny, by the way, how Google wondered about the legality of having its data inspected by the data protection authority.
Nothing "funny" about it; they probably have good lawyers, lawyers who advised them that handing over the data to the "data protection authority" without a court order may itself constitute a violation of German privacy laws.
Usually that would mean sending someone to have a look and see and perhaps sample the data.
Or it might mean that the "data protection authority" goes on a massive data mining quest to identify file sharers, pornographers, and anybody who runs an open WLAN, and then charges all of those people with breaking the law. They couldn't drive around collecting that data themselves, but they can obtain it from Google. Probably it doesn't mean that in this specific case, but it sets a bad precedent.
Think about it: if you were a government intent on violating people's privacy, what would be the best place to do it? That's right: the "data protection authority", armed with a legal right to request and inspect anybody's data without a court order, just to look for more "data protection violations".
FUCK you and your moronic crap.
Their "wide-area wifi collection" didn't "break into" anyone's network -- not even by the loosest definition of associating to an open AP. They recorded data that was broadcast, but did nothing to cause, incite, or affect its transmission. This obviously puts them in the moral clear, though it doesn't directly speak to the legal situation. After all, many European countries are so fucked up that it's not permitted to own a radio receiver for audio or TV broadcasts without a license from the government, so who the hell knows. But it CERTAINLY doesn't violate any law that can HONESTLY be characterized as "you cannot break into other peoples networks (encrypted or not) and keep the data (small or large amounts)".
Second, note that nobody, not even the German Fucking Government, complained about the original goal, recording BSSID/location data for geolocation. This whole controversy is about the _payload_ data that was stored. Google has claimed this was an accident, and there's not a particularly good reason to disbelieve them -- I'll spend the next three paragraphs spewing forth an explanation of this, even though it does drift astray from any points you may have tried to make.
The way most off-the-shelf tools are setup by default is to record everything, analyse it later. The obvious way to write your own software (from a technical, not legal perspective, because it was written by coders, not lawyers) is to save everything you hear -- on-the-fly filtering is at best an optimization to save disk-space. I'm not clear on whether they're using their own software or an off-the-shelf tool (AFAIK they've not told us), but either way, saving everything is a plausible, even strongly likely, default.
As for the notion "they'd have realized it was filling up the disk with too much data -- what would you do? In the absence of some suspicion of a problem, would you count the SSIDs recorded, figure out how many bytes they should each take, add a reasonable percentage for db overhead, and crap out an expected storage space, just to check? Or would you take it for a run the first day, measure the space used, and call that "typical"? Hint: the latter is not necessarily right, but it's not really wrong, and is certainly what most people would do.
Unless they had a lawyer, or other legal-minded individual, involved to the point of asking probing questions about the _implementation_ (not just signing off on the plan), or otherwise were prompted to an actual suspicion of a problem, it's quite plausible that they did in fact inadvertently capture the data, and remained unaware of it for quite some time. Given that what they say is perfectly plausible, and I have yet to hear ONE SHRED of evidence to the contrary, I guess I'm inclined to believe them.
How exactly is data which is transmitted to the public airwaves by you any different than an SSID which is transmitted into the public airwaves by a router? If you transmit information unencrypted in an extremely widely known modulation scheme, where exactly is the expectation of privacy in doing so? It's like complaining that someone wrote down something you yelled in the middle of Times Square.
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