IP Communications Fumble Nets Google FCC Attention

By Erin Monda, TMCnet Contributor

When you put yourself out there as an expert or a success story, the public and the government will bring you down if they can.

Case in point: we like to tear our presidents down off of their high horses, regardless of party.

And we like to do the same for the great American companies. Or, in some cases, we reward them with stimulus money. It really depends on Congress’ mood.

But lately several governmental institutions, across several countries such as Italy and Canada, have been targeting Google.

Now, America’s FCC (News - Alert) is going after Google for any information (fragments of e-mail addresses, passwords, web surfing behavior or other such web surfing activity) it may have inadvertently gathered via its “Street View” mapping feature.

The FCC inquiry, first reported by The Wall Street Journal, will be centralized on whether or not Google (News - Alert) violated a federal law prohibiting the unauthorized publication or use of messages intercepted over radio networks.

"As the agency charged with overseeing the public airwaves, we are committed to ensuring that the consumers affected by this breach of privacy receive a full and fair accounting," Michele Ellison, head of the FCC's Enforcement Bureau, said in a statement.

While several theories about how this could have happened are being slung around in media forums, it’s unclear whether Google’s information entrapment is a result of their capitalistic greed (was it all an evil, data-mining marketing ploy) – or the simple oversight of an engineer?

Reacting to the FCC inquiry on Wednesday, Google stressed that the incident was simply a mistake, that it did not want the data and that it has never used the information in any of its products and services. "As we have said before, we are profoundly sorry for having mistakenly collected payload data from unencrypted networks," the company said in a statement.

Google has even offered to delete the 600 gigabytes of data – but has not been cleared to do so until some of the investigations have been concluded.

Luckily this legal sandpit hasn’t slowed Google up entirely – the innovative tech giant has recently spent $3.2 million investing in 23andMe Inc., a genetic research company offering genetic testing for individuals wishing to learn what sort of diseases they may be genetically predisposed towards. The tests cost between $400 and $500.

(source: http://ipcommunications.tmcnet.com/topics/ip-communications/articles/116516-ip-communications-fumble-nets-google-fcc-attention.htm)