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Google Declines To Turn Over Harvested Wi-Fi Data
An anonymous reader writes "Google declined to submit data collected as part of the 'Spy-Fi' flap, and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is now promising further action: '"I certainly will be pressing for continued involvement at the federal level in coordination with the states," Blumenthal told Politico Monday, just days after promising to explore "additional enforcement actions" if Google does not share the data soon. Asked to describe what those federal efforts might include, the outgoing attorney general said, "There's a range of potential opportunities for oversight and scrutiny by a member of the US Congress – including letters, meetings, hearings, and potentially even legislation." For its part, Google has tried to defuse the issue by offering to delete the data. The company reaffirmed that position in a Friday statement, promising to work with Blumenthal in the coming weeks, but declined to comment further on Monday.'"
Google should have deleted the data before they even publicly announced that they had accidentally collected it. Would have made the matter a whole lot simpler and would have left less room for political grandstanding.
Yes, the government is certainly a safe place to store sensitive data, what is google thinking?
"letters, meetings, hearings" - If that doesn't scare the bejesus out of Google, I don't know what will.
Apparently Google has already given some or all of the sniffed data to authorities in Germany, Spain and France. I wonder why the US is causing so much more controversy?
Perhaps the US government is asking for more data (eg data from other countries) or has refused to meet conditions Google had set for the European governments, when handing over their shares of the data?
I think perhaps the headache for Google is that they may be required under US law to hold all records for 7 years -- since any data collected is a 'record', they simply can't delete it without the authorisation of the US Government, else they could find themselves in trouble, corporately-speaking. However, it seems this particular politician wants to engage in a little electronic-voyeurism -- which although unsurprising is still a bit unsettling -- and is standing in the way of Google obtaining the necessary exemptions to delete the data.
He will do anything to keep his face in the media.
They want it as part of an investigation into the "accidental" collection of the data. This is standard procedure for a regulatory investigation - the data Google collected is evidence relevant to the investigation.
I'm not sure why you'd be interested in pretending that you don't get this... When's the last time you heard of an investigation in which the law enforcement and legal officials involved DID NOT want to see evidence relevant to their investigation?
Whether or not Atty General Blumenthal has jurisdiction and the right to request that data is something that may need to be decided in a court, but SOME investigative body is certainly going to want to review the data that was collected, since it is (perhaps) evidence of wrongdoing on Google's part, and entirely relevant to an investigation into whether or not Google broke laws in collecting and retaining that data.
The fact that his answer was so evasive is actually very telling. If they had a good reason to be looking at the data they'd have a warrant in hand.
“There’s a range of potential opportunities for oversight and scrutiny by a member of the U.S. Congress – including letters, meetings hearings, and potentially even legislation.”
Translation: we got nothing, so we're gonna try and invent some reason to get the data.
meep
Wouldn't the state just extradite and prosecute? What is different in the process for a corporation?
They would ignore it. Fun fact for you: Google was doing the same thing thousands of hobbiests are doing every day using the same tools. But it's different for Google since there's political hay to be made.
Yes, because nobody's ever been exonerated by evidence in a court of law. Ever. In the entire the history of western jurisprudence.
It's just been one railroading after another of poor innocent guys who never hurt a fly in their whole life, because the corrupt government prosecutors habitually and willfully ignored ironclad evidence that would exonerate the suspect.
1)You don't "accidentally" retain sniffed traffic logs of that size, across your entire international operations, for months if not years, "accidentally." See http://gizmodo.com/5671049/google-street-view-cars-collected-emails-and-passwords I mean come on...someone would have noticed the drives filling up, wondered why, etc. These people are supposedly geniuses, right?
2)There's no political grandstanding here. This is a major privacy invasion. The "grandstanding" has been international, because people are PISSED. Google collected and correlated with location data...MAC addresses and IPs of base stations and client devices. Email addresses. Passwords. URLs. I'm going to be VERY generous and assume that they only captured the sniffed traffic, and not that they intentionally extracted all that from traffic and only stored the extracted data, because that would have been even more obviously-intentional.
3)It's slightly creepy when you go around wardriving. When an international corporation which has a always demonstrated an intense interest in profiling its users and mining its users data for advertising purposes, does it, across the planet? That's just slightly different.
Please help metamoderate.
Two different federal groups were investigating: the Federal Trade Commission, on consumer privacy grounds (they concluded their investigation, and basically said that 'since Google has improved their collection and promised not to do it again, no action is necessary.'), and the Federal Communications Commission, which is actively (at least, active as of the latest I've heard) looking at whether or not Google's intercepting these transmissions is a violation of FCC regulations and relevant Communications Act provisions.
This has been fairly clearly reported. I'm not sure why people here insist on pretending it's just a fishing expedition by the feds hoping to catch Google doing something they can be spanked for. Google publicly admitted that they had captured this data, regulatory and law enforcement agencies want to look at the data that was captured to see if a crime was committed in the capture of that data. It's really pretty straightforward.
As a thought exercise, s/Google/Facebook/g in the coverage around this story, and think about whether or not you'd have a problem with Facebook doing the things Google has admitted they've done, and whether or not you'd want to see law enforcement get involved if they had? Google's "halo" doesn't make it impossible for them to do bad things, even illegal things. When they have publicly admitted to doing something that is of questionable legality, shouldn't an investigation be done? Or should we just shrug and say, "It's google, of course they're good folks. They'd never do anything wrong."
"Whether or not Atty General Blumenthal has jurisdiction and the right to request that data is something that may need to be decided in a court, but SOME investigative body is certainly going to want to review the data that was collected, since it is (perhaps) evidence of wrongdoing on Google's part, and entirely relevant to an investigation into whether or not Google broke laws in collecting and retaining that data."
Evidence for what charge? What you are describing above is commonly known as a "fishing expedition". If Google has been accused of a crime then by all means go to court and get a search warrant to collect evidence, but demanding evidence so that you can go away and scour the books to see if you can find a crime is not how it's supposed to work.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"There's all kinds of things that data could show, leading to any number of possible charges against (and eventual fines collected from) Google."
Sure, just like a cop without a search warrant could find lots of things in your home to hang you with. It's not about trusting either google or the government it's about the rule of law which says the authorities must have probable cause. In this case they don't have probable cause, they don't even have an allegation, which is why they don't have a search warrant.
"You're naivety is astounding!"
Voulenteering ANY information to an investigation that is spending a pile of taxpayer's money looking for a reason to hang you, is not just naive, it's stupid.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.