May 2010

Google Data Admission Angers European Officials

European privacy regulators and advocates reacted angrily Saturday to the disclosure by Google, the world's largest search engine, that it had systematically collected private data since 2006 while compiling its Street View photo archive.

In Germany, Google's collection of the data -- which the company said could include the Web sites viewed by individuals or the content of their e-mail -- is a violation of privacy law, said Ilse Aigner, the German minister for food, agriculture and consumer protection. In a statement Saturday, her ministry demanded a full accounting. "Based on the information we have before us, it appears that Google has illegally tapped into private networks in violation of German law," Ms. Aigner said. "This is alarming and further evidence that privacy law is a foreign concept to Google." Johannes Caspar, the data protection supervisor for Hamburg, who is leading the German government's dealings with Google on the issue, said the company's revelation of illegal data collection would be taken up by a panel of European national data protection chiefs that advises the European Commission. "This is a data scandal of a much larger magnitude," Mr. Caspar said. "We are talking here about the large-scale collection of private data on individuals." He declined to speculate what action European officials might take.

What's so bad about the Google Street View data flap?

[Commentary] Privacy conspiracy theorists hit the mother lode Friday with Google's blog post detailing its inadvertent collecting of snippets of personal data from Google Street View cars in Europe. But why all the fuss?

Steetview has met with equal parts embrace and hostility. Wayward travelers appreciate the ability to see what an unfamiliar place looks like before venturing out - or even on-the-spot, using a mobile device. Governments and advocates have raised concerns grounded in homeland security, privacy, and data retention policies. Google says it has striven to comply with individuals' and governments' requests to take down or blur photos with easily identifiable faces or sensitive information. It had been known that Google and other companies compile databases of home and business wireless computer networks for use in mobile phone location applications - the protocol is at times faster but less accurate than GPS for gauging a location. But Friday's revelation takes the Street View concerns in a different - and litigiously stickier direction. "Googlemobiles," the kitted-out camera cars the company uses to collect images, had been unintentionally recording some of the data transmitted over those wireless networks. Google has hired a third-party auditor to analyze the Street View software and to determine what data it gathered. The auditor will also confirm that the data has been appropriately deleted. That may not be good enough for Germany. Legislative action and penalties could follow.

Europe to Offer 5-Year Plan for Telecom Industry

On Wednesday, Neelie Kroes, the new European commissioner for the digital agenda, plans to introduce a five-year plan for the telecommunications industry in Europe, encompassing issues like digital copyright, data protection, network neutrality and e-commerce.

Her goal, she has said, is to create a functioning single European Union market for telecommunications, one that will let people speak, send text messages and use the Internet from anywhere in the bloc's 27 nations without paying exorbitant fees to mobile operators. But as the release of the long-awaited digital agenda draws near, some competition advocates are worried that Ms. Kroes, who has served on the boards of more than 20 global companies, may not take on the Continent's powerful telecommunications operators. She plans over the next five years to address the biggest digital issues affecting Europeans, strengthening privacy protections online and preventing operators from limiting Internet content on their networks.

China's Web "firewall" should be WTO issue: EU's Kroes

China's Internet "firewall" is a trade barrier and needs to be tackled within the framework of the World Trade Organization, said Neelie Kroes, vice-president of the European Commission.

She said the firewall was a trade barrier as long as it blocked communication for Internet users, preventing the free flow of information. Kroes spoke at the China headquarters of video-sharing company Tudou, a rival of Google's internationally popular video-sharing platform YouTube that is blocked in China. Kroes said it was significant that companies such as Tudou, which uploads user videos, show that the younger generation is taking an active role in tackling censorship. Tudou, which adheres to government censorship regulations, said it deletes 100,000 videos every month for content that involves pornography or politics.

Foreign Companies Chafe at China's Restrictions

Foreign companies doing business in China are increasingly feeling as if the deck is stacked against them. China has filed more than a dozen trade cases to limit imports, imposed a series of "buy Chinese" measures and limited exports of some minerals to force multinationals to move factories to China.

Foreign executives in China find themselves increasingly at odds with Chinese officials over these measures, which Westerners view as protectionist and intended to give an edge to Chinese companies. Surveys by Western chambers of commerce of executives show growing disenchantment in the last year and a sense that doing business in China, never easy, is growing harder. Arriving in Hong Kong on Sunday evening at the start of a nine-day trade mission to China, including stops in Shanghai and Beijing, the American commerce secretary, Gary Locke, said that his agenda for discussions with Chinese officials included Western companies' difficulties in the Chinese market.

Slim Stops Deutsche Telekom, Reliance From Mexico Mobile Entry

Carlos Slim is likely to keep his dominance over Mexico's wireless industry as government regulations deter potential rivals such as Deutsche Telekom AG from bidding for airwave licenses this week.

The government designed the auctions to bring more competitors into the mobile-phone market, where the 71 percent share held by Slim's America Movil SAB has kept prices high for some customers and helped make him one of the world's richest men. While China Mobile Corp., Reliance Communications Ltd. and Deutsche Telekom showed interest, they had concerns about regulators' ability to foster competition, said Gonzalo Martinez Pous, a commissioner at the Federal Telecommunications Commission. It's now unlikely any additional rivals will bid in the auction, he said.

Pressure Grows on Spain to Curb Digital Piracy

In the last decade, a surge of music and movie sharing online in Spain has thrilled fans, but it has also increased pressure from as far away as Hollywood to clamp down.

Spanish lawmakers are expected to vote this year on a measure that would allow the swift closing of sites suspected of facilitating file-sharing. "The triumph of downloading in Spain is partly because people can watch the latest episode of their favorite American series with Spanish subtitles weeks before it gets dubbed and released on television here," said Javier de la Rosa, a former radio presenter who is now a journalism professor at Francisco de Vitoria University here. "The quality and speed is also excellent nowadays, and some Web sites like Series Yonkis even help people by ranking downloads according to quality, so that's very user friendly." The people who are trying to sell the movies and music are a lot less enthusiastic. Sony Pictures Entertainment warned in March that it was considering halting altogether the sale of its DVDs in Spain.

Want to Play FCC Fantasy Baseball? Follow The Title II Debate

[Commentary] Ever since Federal Communications Commission Chairman Julius Genachowski announced his plans to hit the legal reset button and classify some aspect of broadband access service as Title II "telecom" rather than as a Title I "information service," the little hard core world of policy has been all abuzz about what the FCC might do and how that might work or not work or would have this or that unintended consequence. This sort of speculation has much more in common with Fantasy Baseball than with an actual historic event — or what is likely to happen. It's also potentially educational in allowing us to explore possible issues and develop and hone arguments. But using this collective Internet chatter to judge the effective of what the real FCC will actually do in reality, and therefore whether the FCC should take action at all, is as foolish as trying to predict the 2010 World Series from how well my fantasy baseball team performs.

On Speech, Kagan Leaned Toward Conservatives

In her early years as a law professor, Elena Kagan wrote almost exclusively on the First Amendment. There are indications in those writings that her views on government regulation of speech were closer to the Supreme Court's more conservative justices, like Antonin Scalia, than to Justice John Paul Stevens, whom she hopes to replace.

Justice Stevens is not a First Amendment absolutist. He wrote the majority opinion in 1978 in Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica Foundation, which said the government could ban the broadcast of George Carlin's "seven dirty words" monologue. And he dissented in Texas v. Johnson, a 1989 decision striking down a state law that made it a crime to burn the flag, while Justice Scalia was in the majority. There is good reason to think Ms. Kagan disagreed with Justice Stevens in both cases. "Her articles on free speech showed a strong sense of the importance of civil liberties as a bulwark against ideological orthodoxy — a perspective that will give her ready camaraderie with free speech devotees on the court like Justices Scalia, Kennedy and Thomas," Kathleen Sullivan, a former dean of Stanford Law School, said.

Google Says It Collected Private Data by Mistake

Google said on Friday that for more than three years it had inadvertently collected snippets of private information that people send over unencrypted wireless networks.

The admission, made in an official blog post by Alan Eustace, Google's engineering chief, comes a month after regulators in Europe started asking the search giant pointed questions about Street View, the layer of real-world photographs accessible from Google Maps. Regulators wanted to know what data Google collected as its camera-laden cars methodically trolled through neighborhoods, and what Google did with that data. Google's Street View misstep adds to the widespread anxiety about privacy in the digital age and the apparent willingness of Silicon Valley engineers to collect people's private data without permission.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, said that Friday's news would "give quite a bit of ammunition to not only the European privacy commission but the European public, which has been very uneasy about Street View, far more than in the U.S."

Benton

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