Google Declines To Turn Over Harvested Wi-Fi Data 201
An anonymous reader writes "Google declined to submit data collected as part of the 'Spy-Fi' flap, and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal is now promising further action: '"I certainly will be pressing for continued involvement at the federal level in coordination with the states," Blumenthal told Politico Monday, just days after promising to explore "additional enforcement actions" if Google does not share the data soon. Asked to describe what those federal efforts might include, the outgoing attorney general said, "There's a range of potential opportunities for oversight and scrutiny by a member of the US Congress – including letters, meetings, hearings, and potentially even legislation." For its part, Google has tried to defuse the issue by offering to delete the data. The company reaffirmed that position in a Friday statement, promising to work with Blumenthal in the coming weeks, but declined to comment further on Monday.'"
Re:Why not the US government? (Score:4, Informative)
IANAL, but maybe it's because by law of _this_ country they _don't have to_ turn it over without a court order?
Re:Sounds about right (Score:5, Informative)
They want it as part of an investigation into the "accidental" collection of the data. This is standard procedure for a regulatory investigation - the data Google collected is evidence relevant to the investigation.
I'm not sure why you'd be interested in pretending that you don't get this... When's the last time you heard of an investigation in which the law enforcement and legal officials involved DID NOT want to see evidence relevant to their investigation?
Whether or not Atty General Blumenthal has jurisdiction and the right to request that data is something that may need to be decided in a court, but SOME investigative body is certainly going to want to review the data that was collected, since it is (perhaps) evidence of wrongdoing on Google's part, and entirely relevant to an investigation into whether or not Google broke laws in collecting and retaining that data.
Re:Why not the US government? (Score:5, Informative)
Apparently Google has already given some or all of the sniffed data to authorities in Germany, Spain and France. I wonder why the US is causing so much more controversy?
Perhaps the US government is asking for more data (eg data from other countries) or has refused to meet conditions Google had set for the European governments, when handing over their shares of the data?
The issue is that it is *not* the US Government asking to see the data, it's the Attorney General of the State of Connecticut. Who may or may not have any legal justification for even asking for it.
Google has already underwent an FTC investigation over this issue, and an FCC investigation is still pending.
So how many levels in our kludgeocracy should Google have to explain its actions to?
Re:they didn't "accidentally" collect it (Score:2, Informative)
I mean come on...someone would have noticed the drives filling up, wondered why, etc. These people are supposedly geniuses, right?
Because, sure, given the choice between incompetence and malice, it's always malice, right?
You make it sound like there was an army of Google's top engineers working on this one single component. If these engineers are geniuses, how many engineers do you really think they'd need? I'd guess one, maybe two. Yeah, it's got to be malice. There's no way one person would make a mistake, or fail to notice something that someone else's code was doing.
2)There's no political grandstanding here. This is a major privacy invasion. The "grandstanding" has been international, because people are PISSED. Google collected and correlated with location data...MAC addresses
Right. Google (and several other companies, and black hats whose names you will never know) collect MAC addresses and correlate these with locations. I don't think this is what people are up in arms about.
and IPs of base stations and client devices. Email addresses. Passwords. URLs.
[citation needed]. These things were collected in the raw dump of unencrypted WiFi traffic, but no correlation of these things with location was done, unless you know something the rest of us don't. This isn't about what Google "coulda" done, it's about what they did.
I'm going to be VERY generous and assume that they only captured the sniffed traffic, and not that they intentionally extracted all that from traffic and only stored the extracted data,
I don't know why that's being "VERY generous". The various governments that have been granted access to the data have come out and agreed that this is in fact what happened and the form that the collected data was in. Are you actually following what's going on with this, or are you just too stuck in your anti-Google world view that you aren't willing to accept facts that make this seem a little less evil than you want to believe?