Revelations

FCC show that the engineer of Google Street View knew it would be to collect the data, followed by the negative performance of the company for research, show that it has become too large to manage

never crime, concealment. And if there is one thing in recent years have taught us is that the suggestion of a "rogue" employee to have acted alone to do something that resulted in an intrusion is not correct. There must be a lack of management oversight as well.

That's why Google is in hot water today on the revelations contained in the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) report on what was wrong with your program Street View Wi-Fi data collection.

This is what the FCC said the engineer who wrote the code to capture data managers told him about it. He told his colleagues about it. He wrote the code in your "20% of the time" - the "free" time that Google allows people to do projects that interest them - and was then incorporated in the code used in Google Street View car traveling the roads public world, capturing images and data users Wi-Fi networks open.

This was intentional. And once the 600 GB of data had been collected, the engineer (who was appointed by the New York Times, and appears to be an expert in the field of Wi-Fi wrote "wardriving" software in the past) is treated at least once to see which sites "favorites" that seemed to be. (The Guardian, is not to name the engineer because he was not able to independently verify their identity.) The error was not

What about Google? Initially, data were collected "by mistake". No, he did not. Initially, only "fragmentary" data were collected. No, it was: the first page of the FCC report said. "On October 22, 2010, Google began by acknowledging that" in some cases, all e-mails and URLs were captured, and that passwords "This was the work of an engineer in itself, and not in any part of the way how Google rolls.

Ah, the "engineer of criminals." Something like "rogue journalist" denial that the New International used to dismiss complaints about piracy phone, the problem with this defense, is that it ignores the reality: in a business that has any management, someone is going to wonder what is going on, and take some responsibility and stop the evil. Not that I mean that Google is like the New World. But from the point where an undertaking that has become so big and so powerful, however, did not consider how their responsibilities should grow at the same time.

Worse on Street View Wi-Fi is that Google's senior management were so quick to assure everyone in May 2010 that there was nothing to fear, move along, so good. As it turned out that when I was doing that, since October blogpost later admitted, "nobody at Google has analyzed in detail the data that was collected by mistake" - note the reuse of "error" which is still incorrect, since the collection was intentional, not an "error" - "so as not sure what the disks contained". (That's when admitted to the collection of complete e-mail, URLs and passwords.)

Well, if you did not know that in May, why not tell their managers to stop giving people advice misleading at the time? Eric Schmidt was reassuring to be, as Larry Page. What matters, he said, was "actual harm".

In fact - as we will throw the word around - it's not fair, Mr. Schmidt and Page. If you are looking for "real prejudice" you set a ridiculously high barrier. If someone steals my phone locked remotely, then remove and replace with a new in insurance, I have suffered "actual prejudice"? You could easily argue that not. So if Google decides that the world is his toy, and that data can be processed and used sip and nestled in a product you like, when he could have violated the laws of several countries in this way (because

intentionally

interception of communications is against the law in the UK - no matter if they are not encrypted, nor letters or postcards), it is easy to argue that not

damage

. As Boris Becker once said (in a rather different context), nobody was killed. But it is absurd. Damages that result from treating the world as a convenient source of data that can be used to sell advertising is a new reptile: it is that Google no longer respect those outside more. And that is the most slippery of slopes.

V action words

You can see that happening already. The end of the original blogpost said:

The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust - and we are very aware that we have failed miserably here. We are deeply sorry for this error and we are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.

But in other cases it is simply incorrect. His approach to the book author has been nothing short of a panel: scanning millions of books, both copyright (very good) and copyright (not very well: all books with a warning against storing in a retrieval system - including Google's computers) to sell any content or advertisements against content sales. The Splendid ambition (to protect the books of the leak), but little consideration of how people who owned the copyright law. The same applies to the way Google Buzz is introduced, which aimed to create a social network viral link to everyone you by email. Splendid idea - if the only people who know they are fellow Googlers. Allow the virus outside the building, however, and may be related angry ex-spouses, former spouses and boyfriends new, and not in the right direction. Google has good intentions. But intentions are not enough.