Google doesn’t do humility very well, especially in the rarefied atmosphere of the annual Zeitgeist conference. This is generally an opportunity for high flying executives to rub shoulders with the great and good – this year’s opening keynote was by Archbishop Tutu – and spend two days congratulating themselves on their vision and innovation.
It was an uncomfortable place for Google to find itself at the centre of a privacy row over the unauthorised collection of WiFi data by its StreetView cars. Unsurprising, therefore, that the company showed little real remorse over the incident.
Though Eric Schmidt said the incident was being taken very seriously, and that privacy issues would be top of the agenda for Google, there was an insistence by the company that no real harm had taken place.
Larry Page, one of Google’s co-founders, tried to point the finger, instead, at social networking sites as the real source of privacy problems.
“We have had a lot of interest in our logs, but we have yet to find a case in which people have been harmed by the logs. There are lots of cases where people are publishing information online about themselves, which is causing them harm. It is good to be practical about these things and focus on actual rather than potential harm,” Mr Page said.
It is indeed convenient for Google that Facebook has come under so much fire from privacy lobbyists recently. It has helped deflect at least some attention away from the outrage over StreetView - which existed before the WiFi data collection even came to light.
Both Mr Schmidt and Mr Page said privacy was something society would have to debate. Each country would eventually decide what level of public disclosure it felt comfortable with, a process that Mr Page envisioned taking as long as 50 years.
Whether this incident sparks off that debate or not is unclear. The data protection authorities are facing a real dilemma over how to handle the StreetView data breach. So far, only Germany had demanded an investigation. Many others, like Ireland, Denmark and Austria are opting to delete the data and forget.
It would be helpful to shed a little light on how exactly the world’s largest internet company, the self-appointed organiser of “all the world’s information” came to record private data illicitly over three years without anyone noticing. How common is such an occurrence, exactly? It may be a one-off as Google says, but the public deserves an independent reassurance of this.
The problem with European Data Protection authorities has for many years been their unwillingness to take real action against companies like Google. They make some noise, they write stiff letters and then…nothing. Google is still defying European requests to cut the time it retains logs of search queries from nine to six months, and no one has taken any action on this.
Small and under-resourced, the DPAs fear going up against the financial power of Google. But by repeatedly failing to take action, they are calling into question their own role. Society does need to debate online privacy, but with silence from the main privacy champions, it’s difficult to do. The Google issue could be a an interesting test of how many DPAs are really willing to get their teeth out.
