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Germany Fines Google Over Street View - But Says €145k Is Too Small
judgecorp writes "Germany's privacy regulator has fined Google €145,000 over its Street View cars' harvesting of private data — but the official has complained that the size of the fine is too small, because of limits to the fines regulators can impose. German data protection commissioner Johannes Caspar said the fine was too low, for 'one of the largest known data breachers ever,' saying, 'as long as privacy violations can be punished only at discount prices, enforcement of data protection law in the digital world with its high abuse potential is hardly possible.' In 2010 it emerged that Google's Street View cars captured personal data from Wi-Fi networks as well as taking pictures — since then regulators have imposed a series of fines — the largest being $7 million reportedly paid to settle a U.S. government probe."
By making that silly mistake Google opened the door to the whole line of Scroogled commercials and other FUD based attacks by their rivals.
The market is correcting this mistake and "imposing harsher fines" is just more ammunition for them to use on some dumb kid whose trying to sniff dirty pictures from other people's wifi connections.
How is it a "data breach" â" or at least how is such a "breach" Google's issue when it's on the user's side? How can it be illegal to acquire signals "floating freely" through the air? Did Google "crack" anythingâ? Use any "back doors"? I'm sure we'll see a lot of "unlocked door" analogies and perhaps a "car analogy" or two, but this is a "left a Euro on the sidewalk" type deal here...
I know, Google is the new boogieman after Apple and Microsoft...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
If fines are intended as compensation, then fixed-size fines make sense. But if they're intended as a deterrent, they end up being completely ineffective for people or companies with a lot of money. A $10k fine might deter a small business, and a $100k fine will truly scare them, but for a Google-sized company those numbers are all noise, lost somewhere in the sushi budget.
If you really want to have effective deterrence, fines based on a percentage of annual income would be more effective. Some countries already do this with traffic tickets, to ensure that rich people have to care about getting a speeding ticket, rather than just laughing at the (to them) paltry amount.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
That is a generic problem with fines and big corporations, not only something related with privacy issues. As long as fines are applied at absolute values corporations will only laugh at them and keep doing what they want. Fines should be applied at amounts proportionally to a company's value.
Every article I see about this always wails about Google's capture of personal data from wifi networks. Are they cracking the encryption? No? So why is it their fault if people are sending their data over unencrypted links? If people don't want their data read by strangers, they shouldn't be broadcasting it into the street in the clear! I wish someone would force Google to delete all the data they took. Instantly Google Street View would cease to function, as would the Wifi triangulation location system that so many people probably don't realise they use. I bet there would be a far bigger outcry over that than the original "privacy" issues ever raised.
I'm not sure I entirely sympathise with the photo privacy issue either. They haven't put online anything I couldn't have seen myself by standing on top of a car. Or a wheelie bin. Or a bench. Or a phone box. Or a post box. We seem to have very strange ideas of what "privacy" really entails.
...and time served!
What do you get "the official"? Monkeys with typewriters edit submissions.
I walked past that house/building and didn't shut my eyes. Biological or digital. Lock me up.
From the article, "Many believe that isn’t enough, hence why the European Commission wants to introduce fines for up to two percent of companies’ turnover, as part of an overhaul of EU data privacy law."
Now, I agree that 145k euros is a paltry sum for Google, but two percent of Google's turnover would be overkill to the most extreme degree for gathering data from open WiFi networks. The punishment should be proportional to the crime, not to the perpetrator.
You're embarassing yourself Jeremiah Cornelius http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3581857&cid=43276741 since you posted that using your registered username by mistake (instead of your usual anonymous coward submissions by the 100's the past 2-3 months now on slashdot) giving away it's you spamming this forums almost constantly, just as you have in the post I just replied to.
It's hard to astroturf when no subject ever is about the thing you are trying to promote. I guess the closest one will have to do.
In the time it took me to type this message, Google earned $1.54 million.
How much do you fine them before it's a rounding error that they fail to notice?
LOL, fine be a jerk. I wasn't astro-turfing. Honestly, I'm not a fan of MS's products.
It's just kind of a weird world: where renting/leasing out flippin' airplanes to take pictures of neighborhoods... is somehow less of a legal-nightmare and invasion of privacy than a car with a panoramic camera. There was a time when people feared "black helicopters" invading their rights and such more than people in cars.
Hey, some guy driving the car made a mistake going where he/she shouldn't... some private road, some really long driveway that looked like a continuation of the road, etc. It was a mistake by a poor guy that probably got fired / reprimanded for his goof, not some company trying to be evil. Now the whole WiFi thing... meh. Haven't been following up on it.
I'm sure we'll see a lot of "unlocked door" analogies and perhaps a "car analogy" or two, but this is a "left a Euro on the sidewalk" type deal here...
No, it's more like a peeping tom looking through someone's window.
And we in the US of A need to start being like Europe with our privacy laws.
There's this huge market for people's data and considering how cheap data storage has gotten, it's nothing for big corp to create a dossier on someone - today.
Just pull your own credit file from the bureaus and just see what THEY have - and you'll see all the previous addresses where you have lived and other information when they try to verify your identity.
The Medical Information Bureau has all your health history available to anyone with the $$$.
And now we have Google on the street photographing our yards and seeing what wi-fi we have.
We peons are at the mercy of corporate America.
And in the meantime, Google's billionaires have enclosed yards, private armed security guards, and the resources to give themselves all the privacy they want - and the power to crush anyone who wants to use any available public information against them.
Under Windows, the situation is the same if you have the local DNS cache server disabled. If the local DNS cache server is enabled, it took almost 2 hours to load the hosts file, during which time all DNS lookups were blocked. Why? Well, the DNS cache isn't designed to holed 645,000 items so after every insert, it rehashes and moves all the previous entries around. That's ~ O(N*N*N) performance.
tl;dr - APK is an idiot or a troll. Probably a troll since his early comments were about Windows being more secure than Linux before he started spewing this HOSTS shit.
Both parties are to blame in this case. Users with unencrypted home wifi are being careless by taking no precautions to secure their data, and Google is morally in the wrong for taking advantage of that. Just because something is in plain sight and not locked up does not mean you should take it without asking.
Finding a single unlocked door is completely different from deliberately going around and testing every single door you find.
Stumbling across a Euro left "on the sidewalk" is nothing like putting on scuba gear and diving into a wishing fountain and taking all the money you find in it.
Why the hell is there such a "It's GOOGLE so it must be OK" bent here?
"Ok, this is hilariously bad advice. I tested his 645,000 line hosts file under linux."
But there's one benefit.
The hosts stuff is always in his posts, so you can use it to filter the asshole out.
The data that was collected consisted of only the beginnings of packets, by an antenna that randomly switched between many different frequencies.
If Google was really trying to collect personal data, why didn't they collect entire packets on all the frequencies? They certainly have the resources to do it right.
You really have nothing better to do, do you?
No offense intended but that's very sad.
You're embarassing yourself Jeremiah Cornelius http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=3581857&cid=43276741 since you posted that using your registered username by mistake (instead of your usual anonymous coward submissions by the 100's the past 2-3 months now on slashdot) giving away it's you spamming this forums almost constantly, just as you have in the post I just replied to.
Hey, some guy driving the car made a mistake going where he/she shouldn't... some private road, some really long driveway that looked like a continuation of the road, etc. It was a mistake by a poor guy that probably got fired / reprimanded for his goof, not some company trying to be evil. Now the whole WiFi thing... meh. Haven't been following up on it.
What I've seen is the groupthink shift from "if the signals are floating through the air it's OK to intercept them while I look for free wifizzz" to "google collecting all this information must be eeeevil!" It's OK if people do it, but not OK if google does it, apparently.
There's some merit to the idea, because google is in a much better position to abuse information. But on the other hand, is your network secure or isn't it?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
George Orwell
Google Rewler
...of how laws represent the morale of the masses, not what's right and wrong.
Short of criminal penalties (even a couple days in jail), paying any amount less than the profits is just a cost of doing business.
The fines should be "profits from the illegal activity" plus a reasonable punitive fine on top.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
It's not like they are hacking into networks--these are *unsecured* wi-fis.
Regulators (and judges) should not complain or make comments about the law, as much as law makers should not comment on how it is applied. If the limit was set (purportedly) low by the law maker, the regulator has to apply it and shut up. If they want to make laws get elected first.