Google Oogled

In May, Google announced that, for more than three years -- in more than 30 countries -- it had been "mistakenly collecting" personal data from open WiFi networks as its vehicles roamed the streets taking photos for its Street View mapping service. That data could include people's email messages, their passwords and even the logs of their Web site visits.

This week, more than 30 state attorneys general announced they will begin examining the lawfulness of Google's actions, though it still isn't clear whether Google committed any legal wrongdoing. "At the very least, Google acknowledges that intercepting and gathering people's data was wrong," Connecticut AG Richard Blumenthal told WIRED. "But there may be a need to strengthen and enhance federal and state laws." Meanwhile, the chief of the Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau of the Federal Communications Commission has issued a warning to consumers that Google's "behavior" raises important privacy concerns, adding that the collection of WiFi data, "whether intentional or not ... clearly infringes on consumer privacy."

The Google disclosures have triggered one of the biggest public probes of online privacy so far in the digital era. Google, in response to government inquiries and lawsuits, has claimed that it is lawful to use packet-sniffing tools readily available on the Internet to spy on and download payload data from others using the same open Wi-Fi access points. But two months ago, in May, shortly after the FCC and U.S. Justice Department began looking into the Street Maps issue, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told a Google developer conference his company "screwed up" by improperly collecting the WiFi data. "We screwed up, and I'm not making excuses about it," Brin said. "Trust is very important to us and we're going to do everything we can to preserve it." Brin said the company is "putting more internal controls into place and bringing in third parties to work on this issue, as well." Google also has begun destroying some of the Wi-Fi data it collected for Street View -- in some cases, at the request of governments, including Britain's. But privacy advocates now say Google should preserve the data and turn it over to governments.

"The problem here is that there are criminal laws at issue, and there is a real question as to whether Google violated these laws," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a nonprofit privacy rights group in Washington. "If it did, the evidence is in the information Google collected. Google has tried to minimize the data it collected, calling it snippets or fragments. But that's a determination that needs to be made by a third party, possibly a prosecutor."

For one of the most comprehensive overviews of the Street Map issue -- including a timeline of the Street View program from its launch in 2007 to Germany's announcement last month that Street View vehicles have been collecting data from WiFi networks -- see EPIC's Web page on the brouhaha.

Street View isn't the only Google product that has been drawing recent privacy concerns. In February, EPIC filed a complaint against the company with the FTC, seeking constraints on Google Buzz, the company's new social networking service. The complaint describes an attempt by Google "to convert the private, personal information of Gmail subscribers into public information" for the Buzz service. "This change in business practices and service terms violated user privacy expectations, diminished user privacy, contradicted Google's own privacy policy, and may have also violated federal wiretap laws." [Facebook also has come under fire from privacy advocates for ongoing problems with its privacy settings, chiefly the lack of control users have over personal information that others have made public about them, including photographs. Another sore spot: Facebook's decision to push users into using its "instant personalization" feature, the company's link to third-party Web sites such as Yelp and Pandora that share users' opinons on shops and tunes.]

What do you think? As the Web becomes more "social," should consumers have more of a say in how their personal data is distributed across social networks? [See Radical Shock, a Q&A by Cause Global with privacy scholar Helen Nissenbaum about the need for new privacy protections that don't care so much about whether data is shared "but whether it's being shared appropriately."] Let us hear from you.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Photo: istock.com)

Privacy, Revisited

Today is Data Privacy Day; Congress voted quietly last year to have the United States join Europe in designating January 28 as an annual, international holiday to raise awareness about the importance of data privacy protection.

Make no mistake: the privacy debate is hotter (and louder) than ever. The recent uproar over Facebook's new Terms of Service—and then, even more recently, Twitter's new service terms—"is all about privacy," says Georgetown University law professor Marc Rotenberg. "It's not the old-fashioned parchment scroll, carried by courier on horseback from the castle to the king's army notion of privacy," says Rotenberg, the director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a nonprofit he founded in 1994 to address the Internet's impact on society's traditional notions of privacy. "This is "modern-day privacy, about digital identity, the control of personal information, and the brewing battle between what we post and its commercial value." [For more on Rotenberg's views, see his essay that ran recently in The Huffington Post, suggesting that "we give up personal information all the time but that doesn't (nor should) end the discussion over privacy." That, says Rotenberg, is where the discussion begins.]

Just don't tell the social media executives meeting in Davos this week. There, halfway 'round the world from Rotenberg's Washington, D.C., office—and while Rotenberg was commemorating Data Privacy Day in press briefings and other talks elsewhere—the chiefs of Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Ning and LinkedIn squeezed into a small, packed anteroom at the World Economic Forum to share their predictions for social networks, discuss their impact on society (for better or worse) and ponder why their companies hadn't yet figured out a way to make big money off their subscriber's digital social connections.

Tim Berners-Lee, the British physicist who invented the World Wide Web, told the Davos gathering that "little changes in how your treat privacy can dramatically affect the way a social network works." He said that in eBay's case, for example, the site has increased privacy in some areas as the online auction site has matured. The site now hides the identity of people bidding against each other. Younger users, though, seem far more open to revealing personal details about themselves.

Then it was Reid Hoffman's turn. The executive chairman and founder of LinkedIn told the group: "All these concerns about privacy tend to be old people's issues." Transparency and accessibility are two reasons, he said, that so many younger users—teenagers and young adults—put their mobile phones on Facebook or MySpace. "The value of being connected and transparent is so great," Hoffman said, that privacy is not a concern but a hindrance.

Rotenberg wasn't present. But Don Tapscott, author of books on the so-called Net Generation and the need for corporate transparency in the Digital Age, took Hoffman on. Social networking, Tapscott said, would become what "we want it to be" over time, meaning that if we wish to build civic values into social network sites, we will—and should. "[The Internet] has an awesome neutrality and we need to build into it basic human values," Tapscott said. "...And one of those values is the right to informational privacy and the right to be left alone. I completely reject this view that privacy is dead. It's in deep trouble, it needs to be saved and everyone needs to get involved to protect their own information."

Indeed. [Says Rotenberg: "I smile every time someone says privacy is dead or the Facebook generation doesn't care about privacy. If there is one issue that people feel passioantely about today, that literally unites everyone who goes on line, it is the interest in privacy. And the battle is just beginning."]

What do you think? Is privacy an "old people's issue" or more about civil liberties in the 21st century? Let us hear from you.

—Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: istock.com)