Google breaks privacy laws?

Probably many of you have noticed those weird looking cars with huge cameras installed on their roofs! Well they belong to Google a world known leader in providing live street views and photographs which you can find on google maps. So today's post will be written about Google and whether they are doing a right thing by taking pictures of public even though not intentionally.

According to the UK regulator Google broke data protection laws when cars that they use for taking photographs of residential streets not intentionally collected additional personal data.

The Information Commissioner’s Office said that it had concluded that there had been “a significant breach of the Data Protection Act” when Street View cars collected payload data as part of a WiFi mapping service (FT.com)

According to the commission , they decided not to impose a financial penalty on Google but said the US giant would have to sign a document to ensure a similar breach would not happen again. Pitiful for the company but they will have to go through a number of audits.

A similar incident happened with Google one month before in Canada and Spain last month when regulators ruled that Google had broken local laws after finding evidence that the US group had collected fragments of personal data including e-mails, URLs and passwords.

Google said that it was “profoundly sorry” for mistakenly collecting payload data in the UK from unencrypted wireless networks.

Google: “Since we announced our mistake in May we have co-operated closely with the ICO and worked to improve our internal controls,” said Peter Fleischer, Google’s global privacy counsel. “As we have said before, we did not want this data, have never used any of it in our products or services, and have sought to delete it as quickly as possible.”

The final decision was made when the IOC said it would delete the payload data collected in the UK as soon as it was legally cleared to do so.

Now the final question stands in front of us general public: "Do we really need this Street View which interferes in our daily life and collects the data that we might not want to share?"

K.S.