Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Relents, Will Hand Over European Wi-Fi Data

Posted by timothy on from the at-least-we-know-the-govts-won't-abuse-it dept.

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."

10 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Not good by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    I trust Google more than German officials, really... (I'm speaking as a German citizen)

    1. Re:Not good by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 5, Interesting

      ``I trust Google more than German officials''

      I wouldn't. Both Google and German government are made up of people. There will be good people and bad people in both organizations.

      The major differences are that the the German government has a rather limited sphere of influence and you have some control over it through elections and other measures, like demonstrations, campaigns, founding your own party, etc. You vote along with a lot of citizens who are in the same boat as you are.

      On the other hand, Google operates world-wide, and I doubt that you have a lot of control over their actions unless you work for them. Sure, you can buy shares and have a vote, but it will be your vote among that of a lot of people who don't know and/or don't care what happens in Germany.

      Speaking for myself, I would rather keep my data away from both the government and large multinational companies. I am certainly no more comfortable with Google having it than with my (Dutch) government having it. And, as this case demonstrates, it doesn't necessarily matter who collects the data - you may be more comfortable with Google collecting it than with your government collecting it, but it looks like now both Google and the government are going to have it.

      --
      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  2. Re:Great by micksam7 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    They opened the can of worms by announcing that they had collected it. If they stayed silent, and shredded the data quietly, they'd probably wouldn't be in this mess and no one would have known they ever did it. Google instead has been trying to make this situation 'right' by being transparent about it, and no one gives a crap about it. The governments certainly are going to grab that data, use it as evidence to prosecute Google, and keep it around for ~other reasons~ for years upon years.

  3. The data is potentially court evidence by khchung · · Score: 3, Interesting

    To all who advocate deleting the data, repeat after me:

    The data is potentially evidence in upcoming court cases.

    Repeat this until it finally occurs to you that destroying evidence when you know it will likely wind up in court is a very bad idea. . Judges usually don't like defendents who destroy incriminating evidence, especially after the authorities already knew of it's existence and has asked for it to be turned over.

    If I sneaked into your home and copied your diary, then put the copy in a safe. Then when the police found this out and asked for me to give the keys to them, the correct response is NOT to burn everything in the safe to "protect your privacy".

    --
    Oliver.
  4. Re:Great by orkysoft · · Score: 2, Interesting

    They could have announced it after they destroyed it.

    --

    I suffer from attention surplus disorder.
  5. Re:Why is this still in the news? by key.aaron · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Google has stated that their equipment changed channels 5 times a second. So there is no more than 0.2s of data on any one network. Good luck doing anything with that...

  6. Re:let's be clear WHY they stalled by zuperduperman · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Yes, it is a nice illustration of the double standard that the government is applying. I would like to now see a class action against the government(s) to sue *them* for breach of privacy. Then they would have to either go to court and argue it wasn't a privacy breach (in doing so admitting that what Google did wasn't that bad) or go to court and admit they are even worse privacy breachers than Google (since Google did it accidentally, while they pursued it intentionally).

  7. Re:Great by jonbryce · · Score: 1, Interesting

    Yes, and it was so inadvertant that they even applied for a patent on it. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/06/03/google_wardriving_patent/

  8. Getting worse by space_hippy · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Still not as bad as the state of New Mexico, where you can be convicted and go to jail for driving "impaired" based solely on the officers "expert" opinion.
    No breathalyzer.
    No blood test.
    You don't even have to fail the field sobriety test. All up to the police officers expert opinion. Some judges are convicting these cases when they should be tossed out.

    The burden of proof is shifting to the defendant, not good in my opinion.

  9. Re:Great by Cyberllama · · Score: 2, Interesting

    It's not a gold mine to anyone. We're talking about 600 gigabytes of packets over 6 years. Not nearly as much as they could have collected had this been done intentionally. This is a trivial amount of data that could easily go unnoticed by Google. This would fit entirely on one hard drive with plenty of room to spare.

    Now ask yourself, if the Street View car drives by your house and at that exact moment you're using the internet, how likely is it to be something unencrypted and sensitive? Emails take a split second to download, and the street view car is only listening for a split second. The timing would have to be a 1 in a million shot.

    If I download, on a given day, 3 megabytes worth of webpages, 100 kilobytes worth of Email, and 50 megabytes worth of gaming, 300 megabytes worth of netflix streaming, 1 gigabyte worth of bittorrent -- ask yourself what are the odds that the street view car gets a slice of that 100 kb instead of something else completely useless to anyone?

    So yeah, we have like 600 gigabytes, of which maybe a few hundred megabytes might actually be sensitive plain text information at best -- and even then you're not getting all of it, just fractional bits. Spread out over 6 years, you think this tiny trickle of single tiny pieces of peoples emails, half of which probably went through gmail anyways, is something Google is willing to break the law to get?

    Seriously. What the hell do you think Google wants with this? Take the tinfoil hat off and THINK.