Slowly but surely, cases against Google over WiFi snooping are gathering pace. The UK police on Tuesday officially began to investigate the search company for criminal interception of wireless content, following a complaint by Privacy International, the pressure group.
Getting the police to take up the case was not easy, said Simon Davies of Privacy International. There were nearly two weeks of deliberations as to exactly how to proceed and which police body would handle it. This is not surprising. The UK has long struggled to pursue any internet-related criminal cases, and only recently re-established any sort of centralised e-crime reporting body. A muddle of regional police forces have occasionally struggled to track even the more mundane phishing scams, much less accusations against a rich and powerful international internet company.
Still, the case now has an official crime reference number: 2318672/10, and a certain due process of gathering evidence must begin.
The UK police decision to accept the case may have been accelerated by a statement from the French data protection authority, CNIL, earlier this week that it had found email addresses and passwords among the WiFi data collected by Google. There were also “data that are normally covered by … banking and medical privacy rules”.
The French are going to take a little longer – until September – to decide on whether there is a criminal case to be answered. However, the CNIL statements might have helped convince the UK police that there were genuine grounds to proceed. Eric Schmidt, Google chief executive, has tried to downplay the incident as a mainly hypothetical problem, with no real data captured- “no harm, no foul”, as he put it. But if real people’s email details and passwords have been found, that view will be harder for lawmakers to accept.
