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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."
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.
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?
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.
The "market" would never know about this if the government agencies hadn't investigated. They could just have ignored the whole issue. In fact it was quite specifically the German authorities that brought this up by auditing the Street View system. The only possible way to do this is to have a special authority which has the right to investigate and punish. The punishments must be more than the amount that the company can expect to make.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
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.
No. It is like taking a photo from the street.
The same exact thing google already does, except with things that get information we normally can't (i.e. wee can't percieve those kind of signals with our own eyes, ears or any other part of our body that I know of). Some other being may, but we can't.
Google came out themselves about the issue. If anything, these years of fighting over the issue should make companies not want to disclose voluntarily.
This article from Tech Eye says that it the admission was forced by a request to audit from the German authorities. Do you have a more specific time line for this?
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Google came out themselves about the issue. If anything, these years of fighting over the issue should make companies not want to disclose voluntarily.
This is not correct, and I don't know why this re-written history keeps getting repeated on geek sites like Slashdot.
Google actually first guaranteed the German authorities that they were not collecting anything. And first after the German authorities despite this assurance still demanded a full audit of the data anyway, did Google do their disclosure (source: see link below).
This sequence of events was covered extensively in European press (one of many sources), and I don't know how mostly US geek sites ended up with and keep repeating an alternative version.
"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.
The Medical Information Bureau has all your health history available to anyone with the $$$.
"Medical Information Bureau"? Never heard of them.
But of course, if anyone is releasing medical data on people without their permission, they are already breaking Federal Law...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
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.'"
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.
Your child's window appeared in streetview and you think that's dealing child porn? No wonder they didn't take you seriously the first 2 times. They probably complied if only to shut up a nutter.
I guess some people simply still can't accept that Google is not the white knight, but a company like any other.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I guess some people simply still can't accept that Google is not the white knight, but a company like any other.
That's an insult to most companies.
Of course news about a fake are Fake News.
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.