European courts brought more bad news to Google’s recent reign of error as Switzerland’s top Court ruled that Google’s Street View mapping service violated the privacy of its citizens forcing Google to blur faces and license plate numbers before putting images on the Internet. The Swiss Court stated, “the interest of the public in having a visual record and the commercial interests of the defendants in no way outweighs the rights over one’s own image.” Switzerland joins the United Kingdom, Spain and France all of whom have found that Google violated various privacy laws.
Lately, the United States has gotten into the act. Last year, the Federal Communications Commission opened an investigation after the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a complaint asking the Commission to investigate violations of federal wiretap law and the U.S. Communications Act. Now, the FTC has launched an anti-trust probe into Google and the Senate will be holding hearings on privacy and Google’s anti-competitiveness nature when Congress returns in September. But authorities have only begun to scratch the surface of issues relating to whether Google has lived up to its mantra of “Do No Evil.”
One thing is clear–Google’s position on privacy turns America’s long-standing view of the Constitution on its head.
In December 2009, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, declared about privacy concerns: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines–including Google–do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”
If Schmidt’s view was the law of the land, police would be able to enter your home without a warrant because if you have nothing to hide then you should welcome them into your home whenever they want.
Google has become the de-facto watchman of oour every Internet move. Google gathers IP addresses, dates, and times for a 9-month span for a single user in order to determine what ads to display according to location, content of e-mails, and YouTube video watching habits. Google stores, scans, and analyzes millions of e-mail messages via the Gmail system. Through Google Maps for iPhones and the Android platform, Google can easily track a user’s whereabouts, hence the scandal earlier this year in which this was proven to be actively going on in both iPhones and Android phones.
Google also has detailed satellite imagery, images from their “Street View” fleet of cars fixed with wide-angle cameras, and of course we can’t forget the fact that Google never gets rid of this data. Never.
These capabilities and attitudes are all the more troubling in light of Google’s growing relationship with government authorities–like the NSA, a relationship that involves communications and searches that a court recently ruled could remain secret.
The reality is that Google has pioneered many of the most invasive practices on the web today placing them at the dead center of the thorny issues that surround the nexus of e-commerce and personal privacy. And investigations into Google’s behavior are bound to raise a multitude of competing opinions on the matter. But anyone who thinks that Google’s unprecedented capabilities coupled with a long and clear track record of outright disdain for privacy (and even the rule of law in some instances) aren’t a problem are just wishful thinking.