Craighton's Logic

Google Under Attack By Australia Privacy Law

Posted by on Jul 9, 2010 | 3 Comments

Google is still feeling the backlash from the Street View incident, where Google collected Wi-Fi data from private, unencrypted networks. After an investigation, Australia’s privacy commissioner Karen Curtis is now publicly releasing a statement saying that Google broke Australia’s privacy law by collecting private Wi-Fi data. Several other countries are investigating the incident, including the US.

“Collecting personal information in these circumstances is a very serious matter. Australians should reasonably expect that private communications remain private,” Curtis said in a public speech he released when Australia was done with their initial investigation. Curtis also stated the privacy act prevented her from imposing punishment on Google. However, Google said that it will be open with personal data activities in Australia, as well as conducting a privacy impact assessment on any new Street View projects involving personal data.

Google apologized for the incident in a blog post when it first became aware of the situation. Then, pending Australia’s investigation one of Google’s engineers, Alan Eustace, posted a public apology to Australia on the Google Australia blog.

[Full Australian Report]

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  • Tracy

    Guess people ought to learn about wireless security before they go out & plunk a wireless router onto their network, eh?

    Google really ought to not be “war-driving” for their info, either, but lots of fault to go around for everyone….

    Naturally, it won’t occur to anyone to put some blame back onto the signal-owners for not securing their own stuff. I wonder if they lock their house or cars?

    Geez….

  • http://www.australianguy.com Dean

    And convicted criminals are probably responsible for the violence they suffer in prison as well, rather than the people who have actually dished it out to them, Tracey?

    You’d find that Australians are generally more concerned than a lot of other countries when it comes to locking down their wifi networks for the simple reason that we pay x amount of money for y amount of bandwidth each month and it isn’t cheap. We don’t want our neighbors stealing from us or unintentionally connecting.

    We’re also a society that still has some fundamental rights and privacy is an important one. The implication that its the fault of people for not securing their wireless connections is bred from the same mentality that says “Well I haven’t done anything wrong so I don’t care if the government can more easily tap my phone, freeze my money, or lock me up indefinitely… because I’m innocent.” Australia hasn’t even had to learn from its own history in order to have maintained where an appropriate line is yet I’m going to take a confident shot in the dark that you’re from a “Free” part of the world where the foundation of your society is supposed to be built upon the mistakes of the past and freedoms bought with blood but has utterly failed to uphold that.
    I find your perspective naive.
    If you get arrested because you lose you job and your cheques bounce, perhaps you can tell the court how the bank was partially responsible given how its just asking for trouble when you give people the means to make purchases like that…

    Moving on from that. Something that I have yet to hear in regards to Google “accidentally” collecting data from all over the world, is that it given their resources they may well by this point after all the “accidental data” is analyzed not need to really worry about weather your data was encrypted or not. If anyone on this planet is now capable, and has been capable given data that would have been collected, of sniffing WPA and WPA2 networks with but a small amount of logic applied to decrypting it, it would be Google.

    Wherever there’s a street mapped, Google was there, and wherever there was an encrypted access point, Google was there. They also happen to serve their own page quite a lot and cache everyone else’s page in addition to having the ability to put massive distributed computing networks to work on any single task if they want to. I honestly don’t know why this doesn’t get pointed out when people talk about what they did.