By Amy Thomson
May 28 (Bloomberg) -- Google Inc. has been ordered to turn over to an Oregon district court data it collected with people’s e-mails, files and digital phone records by next week, according to court documents.
Google sends out cars to photograph streets and houses that people can see with the Street View feature in Google Maps. The vehicles also scanned for Wi-Fi networks used for Internet access and collected private data from the wireless networks of some homes, according to a complaint filed by two people who may have been affected. Google said in a blog earlier this month it mistakenly collected the Wi-Fi data.
Oregon District Court Judge Michael Mosman issued a restraining order this week to stop Google from destroying the data it gathered and to turn over copies of the information, after Google deleted similar data from other countries. Vicki Van Valin and Neil Mertz, who have sued Google for invasion of privacy, said that destroying the data would hurt their ability to prove Google’s wrongdoing and assess damages, according to a complaint filed on May 17.
Google, based in Mountain View, California, argued in a filing the district court’s order is unnecessary since it had taken steps to secure the data.
The Oregon case brings a debate over Google’s privacy practices that has been fought primarily overseas to the company’s home turf, said Marc Rotenberg, president of the Electronic Privacy Information Center. Van Valin and Mertz said in their case that Google used customized snowmobiles and even tricycles to photograph pedestrian walkways, ski resorts and other areas inaccessible by car. The plaintiffs filed their suit on behalf of people in Oregon and Washington.
Wireless Internet
Google also appeared to be creating maps of Wi-Fi networks, or hot spots, around the world, which could have given the company a powerful advantage over rivals, he said.
“It was basically mapping the wireless Internet, but it wasn’t telling anyone it was doing that,” Rotenberg said. “There’s been a lot of privacy discussion around Street View, but most of it was around the collection of images. The much bigger story will be that Google was mapping the wireless Internet.”
Google discovered the Wi-Fi error after German authorities asked to audit the data Google collects for its mapping services, the company said in its blog.
Google said its Street View cars collected information from wireless networks that weren’t password-protected. The company had planned to delete the data, which was equivalent to about 600 gigabytes, or the size of a standard consumer’s hard drive.
FTC Scrutiny
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission will take a “very, very close look” at the way Google collects data, Chairman Jon Leibowitz said this month. Google spokeswoman Christine Chen declined to comment for this story.
The owner of the world’s largest search engine hasn’t fully complied with German regulators’ request for a hard drive containing data the Street View team collected in that country, Hamburg Privacy Data Agent Johannes Caspar’s office said in an e-mailed statement yesterday.
Google claimed that handing over the hard drive would violate German laws because it could contain confidential data.
Google fell $5.74 to $484.72 in Nasdaq Stock Market trading at 1:38 p.m. New York time. The shares had dropped 21 percent this year before today.
--With assistance from Karin Matussek in Berlin, Jeff Bliss in Washington and Brian Womack in San Francisco. Editors: Peter Elstrom, Nick Turner
To contact the reporter on this story: Amy Thomson in New York at athomson6@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Peter Elstrom at pelstrom@bloomberg.net
