Thursday, October 21, 2010

Google handcuffed for violating privacy laws

Vancouver: Internet Giant, Google is handcuffed for violating the rights of thousands of Canadians by inappropriately collecting their personal information in building its Street View service.

Canada's privacy watchdog buzzed the siren when investigations showed Google had captured personal information and in some cases, including a list of names of people suffering from certain medical conditions, and telephone numbers and addresses, was collected.

The blunder was done by the fleet of Street view cars which was used to take images of Street view, was also collecting personal information from unsecured home wireless networks as they drove by. Investigations further, blurted out that the incident was the result of "an engineer's careless error". A Google engineer took advantage of the search giant's policy of allowing its engineers to use 20 percent of their time to work on projects of their interest.The engineer developed a rogue code in 2006 which was accidentally added to the Street view software.

The rogue code collected thousands of e-mail addresses and other personal information from unsecured wireless networks. The Canadian investigation found that the engineer developed the code to sample all categories of publicly broadcast wi-fi. The code was incorporated in the Google Street View cars when the firm decided to collect information about the location of public wi-fi spots in order to feed this information into its location-based services database.When the decision to use the code was taken the engineer said it created "superficial privacy implications", but these were never assessed by other Google officials. Google said on Tuesday it was "profoundly sorry for having mistakenly collected payload data." "We have been working with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner in its investigation and will continue to answer the commissioner's questions and concerns," the company said in a statement.

"We're upset briefly and then life goes on," said Queen's University law professor Art Cockfield. "As long as there is no real sanction to the goodwill of the company that is reflected in loss of future profits they won't change their behavior." Google must tighten its privacy protection systems to prevent a repeat of the incident, blamed on a careless software engineer, and should get rid of the data it accidentally collected, Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said.

Stoddart set a Feb. 1, 2011, deadline for Google to show it has followed her recommendations. She does not have the authority to fine the company, but can take her complaints to Federal Court. Already Google is in fix with allegations about the social network site Facebook not to protect user's personal data from being transferred to third parties, such as game developers.

Looks like Google is stuck in the cross-hairs of privacy officials and will take some time to untangle from all obligations.

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