Only if upcoming technology and services make it possible to aggregate those photos and use them *together* in a systematic and consistent manner akin to Google Maps.
Which part of "You can search for pictures from any location on Flickr, Picasa, and other places, coded by GPS." did you not grasp? There is nothing "upcoming" about it, the technology is already here. And technology like Microsoft Photosynth can take these haphazard collections and assemble them into panoramas and street views. It's just that geocoding cameras are only now appearing in the market, so the coverage isn't complete yet. Give it a couple of years and you won't be able to find a street or even backyard that isn't on Flickr and Picasa and thousands of other sites.
But what Google are doing is creating a data set that already has those consistent and in-one-place characteristics... and from a present-day point of view that *does* make it different.
Many companies have had that kind of dataset before; it's a standard part of city planning, architectural bureaus, stock photography, and map making. The only difference is that those they haven't shared it with you, whereas Google makes it available for free and actually removes you from pictures if you ask nicely. And if anybody from halfway around the globe really wants a picture of your location and really can't find it online, they can hire someone to take it. In a few years, they can also hire a telepresence robot and drive around. Well, they will be able to other than in nations governed by the Taliban, communists, or fascists.
That said, I think it's possible that technology will make that doable sooner rather than later, making the whole greater than the sum of the parts. If people aren't making a fuss about that now it's possibly because the implications aren't apparent yet.
Well, now that you are finally clued in about what is already happening, what are "the implications"? What the hell are you so afraid of? What are Google and Flickr going to do to you?
Google's browser location API is based on IP address, not MAC address. JavaScript doesn't even have access to your MAC address.
The HTML5 location and smartphone application location APIs are based on platform services. When you use location information on an iPhone, it comes from Skyhook, not Google.
(Google Maps on Android may or may not use network information directly; I don't know, but I suspect you probably don't either.)
That's not "funny" at all. I don't mind Google getting my data; I do mind my government getting my data.
That's because Google is just a company. I can stop doing business with them. I can give them a pseudonym, false birthday, and false income information if I like. And if they screw up too badly, they are going to go out of business.
I can't do any of that with my government. I can't get away from them. And they force me to give up all the personal information they desire by law. They do know my true name, my true address, my true birthday, and tons more. And my government isn't going out of business no matter how they screw up; some politicians may change, but the institution and its laws remain.
Data recording and mining by the government is much more serious and dangerous than by any company.
Your phone has at least four sources of location information: GPS, radio towers, WiFi neighborhood, and Bluetooth neighborhood. Any phone that has more than one of those enabled can contribute to a location database. Nobody needs to drive around anymore to collect this information anymore, a billion mobile phone users around the world collect this information free.
The location services on the iPod are provided by Apple (through an API), not Google. Apple has licensed them from Skyhook.
Frankly, I doubt Google even has their own SSID and MAC database. If they do, it's much easier and more up-to-date to acquire it from a software application running on people's phones than by driving around.
So that's not actually doing what Google did because Google did it in a much larger scale and that's what makes it an issue.
No, it doesn't. Because there are millions of people doing exactly what you you say: walking around on a small scale, snapping pictures, and recording WLAN information. They transmit this information to numerous web sites for geolocation and sharing their photos. You may have done it yourself, even your grandmother may have done it. You can search for pictures from any location on Flickr, Picasa, and other places, coded by GPS. Coverage of those public photos isn't complete yet, but it will be in a few years.
Unless you're also going to outlaw photo sharing, private geolocation, image metadata, and WLAN-based triangulation (good luck), getting all worked up over Google Streetview is totally pointless. Even if you were to outlaw geolocated photos entirely, in about a decade, photos will be able to be geolocated simply by content.
So, the "much larger scale" argument is totally bogus.
The question of whether passive reception of WLAN packets constitutes "unauthorized access" is legally not settled in the US. Actually, it really isn't legally settled in Germany either, but it is now being settled as part of this anti-Google hysteria.
From a practical point of you, nothing would happen to you because nobody would ever find out. People have been recording WLAN packets for years and nobody noticed or cared.
Well, many of the people whining about Google Streetview in Germany don't seem to be whining about the tens of thousands of government-owned and operated cameras being installed in Germany. You basically can't leave your house or travel anywhere without having much of the trip recorded.
Property lines are an arbitrary invention of society restricting freedom of snooping
Nothing of the sort. Property lines delimit your private property from other people's private property and the public. There is nothing "arbitrary" about it. It's what you paid for and what you own, no more and no less.
The general principle is that you can do on your property what you like, and I can do on my property what I like, and everybody can do on public property what they like, provided they don't interfere with each other's use of their own property.
the same framework of norms and expectations we apply to geography can be applied to any terrain/medium, including airwaves.
And it is. I am not permitted to step onto your property to listen to your private conversations. But out on the street, I can stand next to you and listen to everything you say; if you don't like it, you have to move, not me. And if you're having a shouting match with your wife in your home, I can certainly listen to it from the street. I can also write down everything I hear in my notebook. I can also use that information to decide that I don't want to have anything to do with you anymore or whether to cancel my business contract with you. I may or may not be allowed to publish that information.
And it should be the same for radio and recording: when I'm on my private property or on a public street, I should be able to receive and record anything I can receive. I should be able to use that information myself for anything I choose. I may or may not be allowed to publish that information.
Your kind of reasoning entails an unreasonable restriction on the right of others to use their private property or to use public spaces.
Why stop at walkie-talkies? Logically, there is some form of microphone/amplifier/signal-processing which can detect any word spoken, even if you are in a tinfoil vault in your basement.
No, what you can do with listening gadgets from the outside is quite limited. A bit of white noise background will do the trick, as will thick walls. Furthermore, recording you and listening to you in that way may be legal and it probably should be legal; legal restrictions on that kind of recording simply are not effective. What should be illegal is using that recording to defame you, to invade your privacy, or to blackmail you. And that it already is.
If your door isn't secure against my axe, is it still wrong for me to go into your house?
Yes, because that's an active measure against your property. The dividing line is whether people actively enter your property, or take or alter your possessions.
The wonderful thing about the law is your data is protected on any network, at any level of encryption and using any base station you like.
You are totally naive if you think your data is protected because some data protection czar makes a name for himself going after an American company. Going after Google isn't going to protect your data one bit. The only reason Google is playing along with this charade is because they really are a legitimate business and the data really is of no value to them. The people you really have to worry about are people who use that data to defraud and blackmail you, and compared to the other crimes they are committing, whether they capture your packets or not is totally irrelevant.
Furthermore, you are effectively required by law in Germany to encrypt your WLAN anyway; if you don't, you're almost certainly breaking both data privacy and copyright law.
In fact, given that the data protection agency is now getting this data, I see no legal reason why they shouldn't search through it for violations of German privacy law, copyright law, and German content restrictions. They could charge thousands of people with crimes based on the data. Maybe that would drive the point home to the morons who think that what's been happening in Germany protects anything.
Try intercepting someone's cell phone signals - with your dumb argument, you should be able to listen to them too and not get sued.
Yes, you should be able to. Creating a law making this illegal is ineffective for protecting your privacy, since the law is impossible to enforce against the people you really have to worry about. And, in fact, it used to be legal to listen to cell phone conversations. Such laws are only really useful for selective enforcement when police, judges, or (indirectly) politicians would really like to charge them with something else but can't find a way to do it. The right place to protect privacy is in the use of such information; and it already is.
and you are ok with one entity picking up every signal in every neighbourhood ???
Yes, I'm perfectly OK with that. In the 1980's, this was still debatable since cryptography wasn't widely available. Today, you have effective cryptography available in every device. If you broadcast cleartext messages containing private data across your neighborhood, you only have yourself to blame.
The presumption should be that everything you broadcast is public and intended to be public, it should not be that people are too stupid to configure their WLANs. Of course, you may argue that people are too stupid and that they can't be expected to configure their WLANs without security. But, in the case of Germany (where all this nonsense is going on), courts have ruled that if you run a WLAN, the expectation is that you are smart enough to encrypt it; if you don't, you face legal liabilities.
Would you mind telling us how we all got to see the riots in Greece on video so?
You also see plenty of police being recorded in the UK (where it is strictly illegal). The reason is that such laws are being enforced selectively; positive coverage and coverage by government media is tolerated, negative coverage, recordings submitted as legal evidence against police, and independent news outfits are charged if they rub someone the wrong way.
The EU is composed of several countries with varying laws, saying "Europe" as a whole is nonsense.
The EU has EU-wide directives and principles that all the member states agree on. In addition, whether formalized or not, there are actually Europe-wide attitudes and beliefs that are distinct from the US and other places. So, yes, one can generalize about Europe, even if there are exceptions. For photography, the major nations (UK, France, Germany) have restrictions on taking and publishing pictures of police. In Greece, the situation is probably just unsettled, but if you think they are going to come down as a shining example upholding freedom of the press and freedom of expression, I think you are a bit unfamiliar with history and contemporary politics.
As far as I am aware the worst that could be done is an accusation of defamation,
If it were about defamation, then the recording itself would be allowed, only its publication would be restricted. But it's the recording itself that is restricted, usually based on supposed privacy rights of police or based on anti-terrorism arguments.
I'm sure the whole "being forced to hand it over to the government" thing is being blown out of all proportion, too. More likely Google realised their mistake (or had it pointed out to them), offered to destroy the data to which the government informed them the standard procedure is that they have to hand the data over to ensure it is properly dealt with, then Google go off, check the legal position, come back and agree. But of course, such a reasonable state of affairs wouldn't sell clicks on news sites or provide fodder for conspiracy theorists...
But it is not reasonable for a supposedly democratic government to be able to obtain 600 Gbytes of private data just because some government bureaucrat says that it is "standard procedure". Private data should only be handed to the government based on a court order, for specific, well-defined, well-articulated purposes.
This is a big deal and it is unacceptable; it's the kind of thing that happens in police states.
I suspect both the German data protection official and Google will face legal problems over this transfer of data.
Yes, even in Germany taking street photographs and collecting packet radio data was legal in the past.
Whether recording unencrypted WLAN packets is or is not legal today has been a legally gray area. It depends on whether one considers such data "private" or not. That question is now being settled in a wave of anti-Google and anti-American hysteria.
What purpose is being served by this is unclear. If you run an unprotected WLAN in Germany, you are probably running afoul of both data protection and copyright laws already.
Google is large enough to be able to get legal advice for other countries before running a massive data collection operation there.
They did. The data they actually intended to collect conforms with German law. They spent months talking to German data protection czars about that.
They simply screwed up and unintentionally collected additional data, and for that they are being crucified.
The whole uproar has nothing to do with privacy or data protection, it's simple hysteria and political and corporate opportunism. Actual German data protection is atrocious.
No let's be clear, Google is reluctant because it's Google's data and they don't want anyone (gov, private or public) to have access to any raw data they harvest regardless what it may be needed for.
The data they collected is clearly useless and of no commercial value to them or anybody else. And from a commercial point of view, they couldn't care less about whether the government gets their data or not. But they don't want their customers to get the idea that they are effectively a government spy agency.
The culprit here is the German government going on data fishing expeditions and doing exactly what privacy advocates are most concerned about: governments pressuring private companies to release personal data to them.
What about you stop insulting people and start engaging in a real debate?
Then you might go back and read up on the intent behind copyright and the original copyright terms: 14 years with one renewal for living authors, explicit copyright notice and registration required. Those terms were thought up by some of the greatest minds in US history. Under those terms, tons of stuff ought to be freely available to the masses. The copyright term extensions that have happened since then have not been justified by clear economic data proving that they achieve their intended purpose; they may even be unconstitutional.
Now, if you want to argue about what ought and ought not to be digitizable and copyable, then please start with the historical and constitutional roots of copyright; otherwise, you're just blowing hot air.
You instantly leapt to defending the Democrats and assuming he was promoting the Republicans by simply pointing out the obvious.
No, I didn't "leap to defending" anybody; I simply pointed out that the correlation he indicated really is not evidence for causation.
His point, as well as mine, was that they're the same.
How can they be "the same" if this kind of thing hasn't been tested yet in Republican states? And what do local and state laws and court cases, in some cases passed years ago, have to do with presidential campaign slogans of a couple of years ago?
As for Obama, I'm not happy with everything he does, but he has changed quite a bit, and I'm quite certain I'd be a lot less happy with McCain/Palin. If you think the two parties are the same, you really haven't been paying attention.
Stop being such an idiot, and stop parading around your political malaise and ignorance as if it were some kind of badge of honor.
My call is they went public with the info because they knew a leak was inevitable, and thought they could save face by being open. They didn't quite count on governments taking an interest so forcefully.
And why should they? Historically, collecting pictures and wireless transmissions in public has been legal. And it's also something plenty of other companies have done.
If Google hadn't announced they'd collected it, they'd never destroy it.
Google has data retention policies and they probably comply with them. And the data is essentially useless. But even if not, what difference would it make? This is publicly broadcast, unencrypted data.
they could still end up looking like the good guys, because hey, the big mean government is taking the data, and who knows what THOSE GUYS are going to do with it.
I really doubt that they planned this. But that is indeed the question you should be asking.
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".
Yeah, that's actually the real question: what are they going to do with it? Look for file sharers? Look for pornography? Under German law, a lot of communications are illegal, and there are probably hundreds of thousands of felonies recorded in that data.
Even more worrisome is the procedure by which the government obtains this. Google hasn't been ordered by a court to hand over this data, it is simply being requested by a government bureaucrat. Penalties for not complying with his demands can be steep, not just for the company but its employees.
Google has been reluctant to hand over this data because it's not clear that governments should have access to this kind of data. If this really represents private data, as the governments contend, the government has no right to access it either, since the contents of the packets are not necessary for determining what Google did.
No, it doesn't depend "very much" on that. European laws and attitudes are generally more restrictive than American laws on photographs of people and photographs in public places. They differ just in how much more restrictive.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if upcoming technology and services make it possible to aggregate those photos and use them *together* in a systematic and consistent manner akin to Google Maps.
Which part of "You can search for pictures from any location on Flickr, Picasa, and other places, coded by GPS." did you not grasp? There is nothing "upcoming" about it, the technology is already here. And technology like Microsoft Photosynth can take these haphazard collections and assemble them into panoramas and street views. It's just that geocoding cameras are only now appearing in the market, so the coverage isn't complete yet. Give it a couple of years and you won't be able to find a street or even backyard that isn't on Flickr and Picasa and thousands of other sites.
But what Google are doing is creating a data set that already has those consistent and in-one-place characteristics... and from a present-day point of view that *does* make it different.
Many companies have had that kind of dataset before; it's a standard part of city planning, architectural bureaus, stock photography, and map making. The only difference is that those they haven't shared it with you, whereas Google makes it available for free and actually removes you from pictures if you ask nicely. And if anybody from halfway around the globe really wants a picture of your location and really can't find it online, they can hire someone to take it. In a few years, they can also hire a telepresence robot and drive around. Well, they will be able to other than in nations governed by the Taliban, communists, or fascists.
That said, I think it's possible that technology will make that doable sooner rather than later, making the whole greater than the sum of the parts. If people aren't making a fuss about that now it's possibly because the implications aren't apparent yet.
Well, now that you are finally clued in about what is already happening, what are "the implications"? What the hell are you so afraid of? What are Google and Flickr going to do to you?
Google's browser location API is based on IP address, not MAC address. JavaScript doesn't even have access to your MAC address.
The HTML5 location and smartphone application location APIs are based on platform services. When you use location information on an iPhone, it comes from Skyhook, not Google.
(Google Maps on Android may or may not use network information directly; I don't know, but I suspect you probably don't either.)
That's not "funny" at all. I don't mind Google getting my data; I do mind my government getting my data.
That's because Google is just a company. I can stop doing business with them. I can give them a pseudonym, false birthday, and false income information if I like. And if they screw up too badly, they are going to go out of business.
I can't do any of that with my government. I can't get away from them. And they force me to give up all the personal information they desire by law. They do know my true name, my true address, my true birthday, and tons more. And my government isn't going out of business no matter how they screw up; some politicians may change, but the institution and its laws remain.
Data recording and mining by the government is much more serious and dangerous than by any company.
Your phone has at least four sources of location information: GPS, radio towers, WiFi neighborhood, and Bluetooth neighborhood. Any phone that has more than one of those enabled can contribute to a location database. Nobody needs to drive around anymore to collect this information anymore, a billion mobile phone users around the world collect this information free.
The location services on the iPod are provided by Apple (through an API), not Google. Apple has licensed them from Skyhook.
Frankly, I doubt Google even has their own SSID and MAC database. If they do, it's much easier and more up-to-date to acquire it from a software application running on people's phones than by driving around.
So that's not actually doing what Google did because Google did it in a much larger scale and that's what makes it an issue.
No, it doesn't. Because there are millions of people doing exactly what you you say: walking around on a small scale, snapping pictures, and recording WLAN information. They transmit this information to numerous web sites for geolocation and sharing their photos. You may have done it yourself, even your grandmother may have done it. You can search for pictures from any location on Flickr, Picasa, and other places, coded by GPS. Coverage of those public photos isn't complete yet, but it will be in a few years.
Unless you're also going to outlaw photo sharing, private geolocation, image metadata, and WLAN-based triangulation (good luck), getting all worked up over Google Streetview is totally pointless. Even if you were to outlaw geolocated photos entirely, in about a decade, photos will be able to be geolocated simply by content.
So, the "much larger scale" argument is totally bogus.
The question of whether passive reception of WLAN packets constitutes "unauthorized access" is legally not settled in the US. Actually, it really isn't legally settled in Germany either, but it is now being settled as part of this anti-Google hysteria.
From a practical point of you, nothing would happen to you because nobody would ever find out. People have been recording WLAN packets for years and nobody noticed or cared.
Well, many of the people whining about Google Streetview in Germany don't seem to be whining about the tens of thousands of government-owned and operated cameras being installed in Germany. You basically can't leave your house or travel anywhere without having much of the trip recorded.
Property lines are an arbitrary invention of society restricting freedom of snooping
Nothing of the sort. Property lines delimit your private property from other people's private property and the public. There is nothing "arbitrary" about it. It's what you paid for and what you own, no more and no less.
The general principle is that you can do on your property what you like, and I can do on my property what I like, and everybody can do on public property what they like, provided they don't interfere with each other's use of their own property.
the same framework of norms and expectations we apply to geography can be applied to any terrain/medium, including airwaves.
And it is. I am not permitted to step onto your property to listen to your private conversations. But out on the street, I can stand next to you and listen to everything you say; if you don't like it, you have to move, not me. And if you're having a shouting match with your wife in your home, I can certainly listen to it from the street. I can also write down everything I hear in my notebook. I can also use that information to decide that I don't want to have anything to do with you anymore or whether to cancel my business contract with you. I may or may not be allowed to publish that information.
And it should be the same for radio and recording: when I'm on my private property or on a public street, I should be able to receive and record anything I can receive. I should be able to use that information myself for anything I choose. I may or may not be allowed to publish that information.
Your kind of reasoning entails an unreasonable restriction on the right of others to use their private property or to use public spaces.
Why stop at walkie-talkies? Logically, there is some form of microphone/amplifier/signal-processing which can detect any word spoken, even if you are in a tinfoil vault in your basement.
No, what you can do with listening gadgets from the outside is quite limited. A bit of white noise background will do the trick, as will thick walls. Furthermore, recording you and listening to you in that way may be legal and it probably should be legal; legal restrictions on that kind of recording simply are not effective. What should be illegal is using that recording to defame you, to invade your privacy, or to blackmail you. And that it already is.
If your door isn't secure against my axe, is it still wrong for me to go into your house?
Yes, because that's an active measure against your property. The dividing line is whether people actively enter your property, or take or alter your possessions.
The wonderful thing about the law is your data is protected on any network, at any level of encryption and using any base station you like.
You are totally naive if you think your data is protected because some data protection czar makes a name for himself going after an American company. Going after Google isn't going to protect your data one bit. The only reason Google is playing along with this charade is because they really are a legitimate business and the data really is of no value to them. The people you really have to worry about are people who use that data to defraud and blackmail you, and compared to the other crimes they are committing, whether they capture your packets or not is totally irrelevant.
Furthermore, you are effectively required by law in Germany to encrypt your WLAN anyway; if you don't, you're almost certainly breaking both data privacy and copyright law.
In fact, given that the data protection agency is now getting this data, I see no legal reason why they shouldn't search through it for violations of German privacy law, copyright law, and German content restrictions. They could charge thousands of people with crimes based on the data. Maybe that would drive the point home to the morons who think that what's been happening in Germany protects anything.
Try intercepting someone's cell phone signals - with your dumb argument, you should be able to listen to them too and not get sued.
Yes, you should be able to. Creating a law making this illegal is ineffective for protecting your privacy, since the law is impossible to enforce against the people you really have to worry about. And, in fact, it used to be legal to listen to cell phone conversations. Such laws are only really useful for selective enforcement when police, judges, or (indirectly) politicians would really like to charge them with something else but can't find a way to do it. The right place to protect privacy is in the use of such information; and it already is.
and you are ok with one entity picking up every signal in every neighbourhood ???
Yes, I'm perfectly OK with that. In the 1980's, this was still debatable since cryptography wasn't widely available. Today, you have effective cryptography available in every device. If you broadcast cleartext messages containing private data across your neighborhood, you only have yourself to blame.
The presumption should be that everything you broadcast is public and intended to be public, it should not be that people are too stupid to configure their WLANs. Of course, you may argue that people are too stupid and that they can't be expected to configure their WLANs without security. But, in the case of Germany (where all this nonsense is going on), courts have ruled that if you run a WLAN, the expectation is that you are smart enough to encrypt it; if you don't, you face legal liabilities.
Would you mind telling us how we all got to see the riots in Greece on video so?
You also see plenty of police being recorded in the UK (where it is strictly illegal). The reason is that such laws are being enforced selectively; positive coverage and coverage by government media is tolerated, negative coverage, recordings submitted as legal evidence against police, and independent news outfits are charged if they rub someone the wrong way.
The EU is composed of several countries with varying laws, saying "Europe" as a whole is nonsense.
The EU has EU-wide directives and principles that all the member states agree on. In addition, whether formalized or not, there are actually Europe-wide attitudes and beliefs that are distinct from the US and other places. So, yes, one can generalize about Europe, even if there are exceptions. For photography, the major nations (UK, France, Germany) have restrictions on taking and publishing pictures of police. In Greece, the situation is probably just unsettled, but if you think they are going to come down as a shining example upholding freedom of the press and freedom of expression, I think you are a bit unfamiliar with history and contemporary politics.
As far as I am aware the worst that could be done is an accusation of defamation,
If it were about defamation, then the recording itself would be allowed, only its publication would be restricted. But it's the recording itself that is restricted, usually based on supposed privacy rights of police or based on anti-terrorism arguments.
I'm sure the whole "being forced to hand it over to the government" thing is being blown out of all proportion, too. More likely Google realised their mistake (or had it pointed out to them), offered to destroy the data to which the government informed them the standard procedure is that they have to hand the data over to ensure it is properly dealt with, then Google go off, check the legal position, come back and agree. But of course, such a reasonable state of affairs wouldn't sell clicks on news sites or provide fodder for conspiracy theorists...
But it is not reasonable for a supposedly democratic government to be able to obtain 600 Gbytes of private data just because some government bureaucrat says that it is "standard procedure". Private data should only be handed to the government based on a court order, for specific, well-defined, well-articulated purposes.
This is a big deal and it is unacceptable; it's the kind of thing that happens in police states.
I suspect both the German data protection official and Google will face legal problems over this transfer of data.
Not in Germany.
Yes, even in Germany taking street photographs and collecting packet radio data was legal in the past.
Whether recording unencrypted WLAN packets is or is not legal today has been a legally gray area. It depends on whether one considers such data "private" or not. That question is now being settled in a wave of anti-Google and anti-American hysteria.
What purpose is being served by this is unclear. If you run an unprotected WLAN in Germany, you are probably running afoul of both data protection and copyright laws already.
Google is large enough to be able to get legal advice for other countries before running a massive data collection operation there.
They did. The data they actually intended to collect conforms with German law. They spent months talking to German data protection czars about that.
They simply screwed up and unintentionally collected additional data, and for that they are being crucified.
The whole uproar has nothing to do with privacy or data protection, it's simple hysteria and political and corporate opportunism. Actual German data protection is atrocious.
No let's be clear, Google is reluctant because it's Google's data and they don't want anyone (gov, private or public) to have access to any raw data they harvest regardless what it may be needed for.
The data they collected is clearly useless and of no commercial value to them or anybody else. And from a commercial point of view, they couldn't care less about whether the government gets their data or not. But they don't want their customers to get the idea that they are effectively a government spy agency.
The culprit here is the German government going on data fishing expeditions and doing exactly what privacy advocates are most concerned about: governments pressuring private companies to release personal data to them.
What about you stop insulting people and start engaging in a real debate?
Then you might go back and read up on the intent behind copyright and the original copyright terms: 14 years with one renewal for living authors, explicit copyright notice and registration required. Those terms were thought up by some of the greatest minds in US history. Under those terms, tons of stuff ought to be freely available to the masses. The copyright term extensions that have happened since then have not been justified by clear economic data proving that they achieve their intended purpose; they may even be unconstitutional.
Now, if you want to argue about what ought and ought not to be digitizable and copyable, then please start with the historical and constitutional roots of copyright; otherwise, you're just blowing hot air.
You instantly leapt to defending the Democrats and assuming he was promoting the Republicans by simply pointing out the obvious.
No, I didn't "leap to defending" anybody; I simply pointed out that the correlation he indicated really is not evidence for causation.
His point, as well as mine, was that they're the same.
How can they be "the same" if this kind of thing hasn't been tested yet in Republican states? And what do local and state laws and court cases, in some cases passed years ago, have to do with presidential campaign slogans of a couple of years ago?
As for Obama, I'm not happy with everything he does, but he has changed quite a bit, and I'm quite certain I'd be a lot less happy with McCain/Palin. If you think the two parties are the same, you really haven't been paying attention.
Stop being such an idiot, and stop parading around your political malaise and ignorance as if it were some kind of badge of honor.
My call is they went public with the info because they knew a leak was inevitable, and thought they could save face by being open. They didn't quite count on governments taking an interest so forcefully.
And why should they? Historically, collecting pictures and wireless transmissions in public has been legal. And it's also something plenty of other companies have done.
If Google hadn't announced they'd collected it, they'd never destroy it.
Google has data retention policies and they probably comply with them. And the data is essentially useless. But even if not, what difference would it make? This is publicly broadcast, unencrypted data.
they could still end up looking like the good guys, because hey, the big mean government is taking the data, and who knows what THOSE GUYS are going to do with it.
I really doubt that they planned this. But that is indeed the question you should be asking.
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".
Yeah, that's actually the real question: what are they going to do with it? Look for file sharers? Look for pornography? Under German law, a lot of communications are illegal, and there are probably hundreds of thousands of felonies recorded in that data.
Even more worrisome is the procedure by which the government obtains this. Google hasn't been ordered by a court to hand over this data, it is simply being requested by a government bureaucrat. Penalties for not complying with his demands can be steep, not just for the company but its employees.
Wardriving is something people did (and do?) for the fun of it, it's not major corporations doing it on a massive scale to collect data on people,
But other corporations have done this as well.
it's illegal too btw in some countries.
It shouldn't be. If you broadcast unencrypted packet, people shouldn't be thrown in jail for receiving them.
Google has been reluctant to hand over this data because it's not clear that governments should have access to this kind of data. If this really represents private data, as the governments contend, the government has no right to access it either, since the contents of the packets are not necessary for determining what Google did.
No, it doesn't depend "very much" on that. European laws and attitudes are generally more restrictive than American laws on photographs of people and photographs in public places. They differ just in how much more restrictive.
Instead, it can actually influence the events that it is recording.
Well, it can. So does a rain shower or Paris Hilton. That doesn't mean that we make these things illegal.
Sometimes it can be a harm.
Yeah, but not as much harm as a police state.