Australia’s communications minister Stephen Conroy isn’t happy with Google’s latest privacy blunders. He called Google’s privacy policy “a bit creepy;” specifically, he said that the recent incident, where Google was caught collecting private wireless data, was the “single greatest breach in the history of privacy.”
Google has apologized for collecting WiFi data from private households, and deleted all the data in its posession. Furthermore, Google claims that the entire incident was a mistake.
“In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data,” Google wrote in a blog post.
Stephen Conroy doesn’t buy that explanation. “It was actually quite deliberate… The computer program that collected it was designed to collect this information,” he said.
Conroy’s accusations stem from the fact that Google criticized Australian Government’s plan, spearheaded by Conroy, to apply a nation-wide Internet filter.
“They consider that they are the appropriate people to make the decisions about people’s privacy data,” Conroy said, adding a jab or two at everyone’s favorite target when it comes to privacy issues, Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook, Conroy said, is “corporate giant who is answerable to no one and motivated solely by profit”.
It’s true; handling over our privacy to private corporations, primarily motivated by profit, is dangerous. However, who can say that governments are any better than private corporations? One needn’t look further than China, whose policy of censoring Internet content created a rift between Google and the world’s most populous country. While governments and big corporations fight for the right to “protect” people’s privacy, for the rest of us it feels like being between a rock and a hard place.
