Google once again finds itself against a large crowd for its major breach of privacy, except this time it isn't a few companies or a handful of individuals. It's 38 states.
The
New York Times recently published an
article reporting that Google has finally acknowledged to state officials that its
Street View program has been
casually retrieving personal data, including passwords and email information, from the application's unaware users.
Unsurprisingly, this was found to be a big issue with a majority of the states, who brought on the case addressing the privacy concern.
It's hard to believe that even after Google's trouble with the massive lawsuit against its social networking tool
Buzz back in 2010, they would still make a huge mistake with privacy breaching...or is it?
Was it even a
mistake?
How in the world does Google collect passwords from a navigational application? One might see how information could potentially be gathered through a messaging system (where log-in is required), but a
map guide? The program was also found to secretly collect
financial and medical data, which brings to light an alarming curiosity of how this could have occurred.
When asked about the issue, Google's response was less than satisfactory for regulators. The company initially stated that no data had been collected from unknowing users, then later attempted to play down the data that had been gathered. Google even went as far as to fight with regulators who wanted to examine the data. The shocking false statements continued to ensue as Google said that all collected data had been destroyed, when some had still remained.
One particularly absurd facet of the company's argument was to place full blame on a single engineer for the entire operation. The Federal Communications Commission had even affirmed, under investigation, that the engineer had worked with others and attempted to inform supervisors of his actions, proving that the engineer was more unsupervised than a rogue (which Google labelled him to be).
Another especially interesting aspect of the case is the
method that Google employed to develop Street View. The company would deploy special vehicles to photograph the offices and houses along streets. However, these vehicles didn't only capture images; they also captured
data off of private networks.
 |
| These seemingly normal cars would secretly gather data from millions of unencrypted networks. |
So what can be expected this time from Google on how it'll do things differently, and what consequences will the giant corporation face? The company has already been fined $25,000 by the FTC for obstructing its investigation on the collected data, and the company faced a $7 million fine from the case itself (which is minimal compared to its net income of about $32 million a day). As for what will change in the company's operations, Google must now comply to an updated settlement that includes:
- setting up privacy certification programs for select employees
- running educational ads in the top newspapers in each of the 38 states
- creating a YouTube demonstration on how people can easily encrypt data on their private networks
- run a daily online advertisement promoting the YouTube video for two years
Is the new plan effective enough to minimize Google's privacy breaching to an extent, if at all? Was the fine large enough, or should there be more serious penalties in other matters (such as fully established regulations that explicitly limit Google's system)?
From a different stance, would
any measure of action render effective against a company that consecutively falsifies the statements of its actual conduct ? Is the gathering of personal data something that may not be able to be physically helped when developing such technologies? What motives could Google have for collecting such data? Leave thoughts in the comments below.
