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business newsWeekly Web Watch: Google in the Crosshairs
By
Carol Kopp
Nov 02, 2010 10:30 am
The company has an international public relations problem on its hands, after 'fessing up to a privacy breach.
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Call me naïve, but I totally believe that Google (GOOG) cars didn’t deliberately scoop up a ton of personal data while cruising around in those Street View cars, if only because they could do that anytime they want to without leaving Mountain View, California. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission apparently agrees, as it just ended its inquiry into the matter with no penalty.
But the rest of the world isn’t so sanguine about privacy issues, especially when a large American corporation with a commercial interest in exploiting information about individuals is involved. What follows is going to be a test case in international public relations, good or bad.
The issue had been simmering for months, but it boiled over last week when Google acknowledged that the personal data it unintentionally collected from unsecured wi-fi networks was more sensitive, and presumably less “fragmentary,” than it had earlier thought. Google is “mortified.”
Unfortunately, so are politicians, regulators and journalists in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Canada.
The most vociferous reaction came from Britain, where harrumphing can reach the level of performance art. A member of Parliament called for an internet “bill of rights” to keep Britons safe from corporate giants and their commercial interests. The Information Commissioner has reopened consideration of the matter. Scotland Yard has declined to investigate, though one Conservative MP denounced that decision as “lily-livered.” A columnist for The Guardian warns that Britons will find themselves another search engine if users begin to think of Google as “a part of an establishment that wishes to exploit them.”
Whether this leads to any onerous regulation -- such as an earlier proposal that property should be viewable on Street View only if the owners “opt in” for it -- probably depends on the wider public response. Google has allowed people to “opt out” of Street View since it went live in 2008. Hundreds responded in the first couple of days, out of millions whose homes were viewable. (In Germany, 3% of the population reportedly opted out.)
And then it all settled down, and people started to like the ease of locating local shops and checking their opening hours online. The newspapers were quick to discover unintentional Street View gotchas -- kids throwing stones in Scotland; a man leaving a sex shop in Soho, a drunk vomiting outside a Shoreditch pub. Far from being horrified, many users turned this into a game. They trawled Street View for more gotchas, or lay in wait to pose for the Google cars. Now, you can spot a boy wearing a horse’s head mask on a street in Aberdeen; a child in a Paddington Bear costume outside the British Museum; Sherlock Holmes on a street corner in Cambridge, and a 10-year-old girl “playing dead” outside her suburban home. And of course the map of Scotland’s Loch Ness clearly shows the Loch Ness monster, or it might be only a speedboat.
The allegedly diabolical American mega-corporation that is Google has made some nice public relations moves, too, for example, deploying mini-trikes with cameras to map beloved national historic sites like Stonehenge that aren’t accessible to cars.
But just as Parliament began its debate over Google’s alleged invasion of Britons’ privacy, the company created a major distraction, throwing a party in London’s Silicon Roundabout neighborhood to publicize a new report it commissioned on the Web’s contribution to the U.K. economy.
But the rest of the world isn’t so sanguine about privacy issues, especially when a large American corporation with a commercial interest in exploiting information about individuals is involved. What follows is going to be a test case in international public relations, good or bad.
The issue had been simmering for months, but it boiled over last week when Google acknowledged that the personal data it unintentionally collected from unsecured wi-fi networks was more sensitive, and presumably less “fragmentary,” than it had earlier thought. Google is “mortified.”
Unfortunately, so are politicians, regulators and journalists in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Canada.
The most vociferous reaction came from Britain, where harrumphing can reach the level of performance art. A member of Parliament called for an internet “bill of rights” to keep Britons safe from corporate giants and their commercial interests. The Information Commissioner has reopened consideration of the matter. Scotland Yard has declined to investigate, though one Conservative MP denounced that decision as “lily-livered.” A columnist for The Guardian warns that Britons will find themselves another search engine if users begin to think of Google as “a part of an establishment that wishes to exploit them.”
Whether this leads to any onerous regulation -- such as an earlier proposal that property should be viewable on Street View only if the owners “opt in” for it -- probably depends on the wider public response. Google has allowed people to “opt out” of Street View since it went live in 2008. Hundreds responded in the first couple of days, out of millions whose homes were viewable. (In Germany, 3% of the population reportedly opted out.)
And then it all settled down, and people started to like the ease of locating local shops and checking their opening hours online. The newspapers were quick to discover unintentional Street View gotchas -- kids throwing stones in Scotland; a man leaving a sex shop in Soho, a drunk vomiting outside a Shoreditch pub. Far from being horrified, many users turned this into a game. They trawled Street View for more gotchas, or lay in wait to pose for the Google cars. Now, you can spot a boy wearing a horse’s head mask on a street in Aberdeen; a child in a Paddington Bear costume outside the British Museum; Sherlock Holmes on a street corner in Cambridge, and a 10-year-old girl “playing dead” outside her suburban home. And of course the map of Scotland’s Loch Ness clearly shows the Loch Ness monster, or it might be only a speedboat.
The allegedly diabolical American mega-corporation that is Google has made some nice public relations moves, too, for example, deploying mini-trikes with cameras to map beloved national historic sites like Stonehenge that aren’t accessible to cars.
But just as Parliament began its debate over Google’s alleged invasion of Britons’ privacy, the company created a major distraction, throwing a party in London’s Silicon Roundabout neighborhood to publicize a new report it commissioned on the Web’s contribution to the U.K. economy.
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