4/30/2012

Google Street View cars collected information on an extra-marital affair

The Obama administration let Google off the hook for this?  From the Washington Post:
A Google engineer knowingly created software that would collect sensitive personal information about people without their knowledge, according to an un-redacted version of a federal investigative report.
In a full version of a Federal Communications Commission report, an engineer shared e-mails with other Google officials indicating the company could collect “payload data,” including e-mail addresses and text messages through a program to collect location-based software from residential and business Wi-Fi networks. The company released the full contents of the report, which was heavily redacted by the FCC, except for the names of its employees.
The report, supplied by Google, concluded that the company’s actions do not violate FCC or federal eavesdropping rules. The agency recently fined the company $25,000, however, for being uncooperative in a two-years-long investigation. A separate investigation by the FTC resulted in no fines and was closed in 2010. . . .
In the report, the FCC cited an analysis by French regulators over a sample of Google’s data collection: 72 e-mail passwords, 774 distinct e-mail addresses and, for example, “an exchange of e-mails between a married woman and man, both seeking an extra-marital relationship with first names, e-mail addresses and physical addresses.” . . .
Over a sample?  I would like to know how large of a sample that involved.  It is pretty clear that the entire amount of collected information is much larger.  It would like to know how big it is.

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1 Comments:

Blogger Larry said...

The idea that they were let off with a fine in one case and investigation closed in another tells me that the government sought other concessions from Google in exchange for making things go away.

I fear this would happen regardless of any actual wrongdoing on Google's part. No company that big, and that influential gets away without having serious government hooks in to it.

Let's just hope those hooks are not competently managed.

4/30/2012 5:34 AM  

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