Korea joins privacy backlash over Google

Google first deployed its Street Car vehicles on Seoul’s streets in October last year, but the debut of the localized version of its online mapping service has been delayed indefinitely, with police investigating whether the company has broken local privacy laws. / Korea Times

By Kim Tong-hyung

The South Korean government appears to have its own BlackBerry headache with Google as it continues to show uneasiness about the data on its citizens kept in foreign servers.

But privacy watchdogs here are unsure who to distrust more; a global corporation that intercepts e-mail messages, passwords and other sensitive information from unsuspecting Internet users or an increasingly-intrusive government that demands the data be handed over.

Korean police raided Google’s Seoul office on Tuesday, representing the latest extension of legal challenges the Internet giant is facing around the world over its controversial ``Street View’’ mapping service.

Investigators acting under warrant seized computer hard drives and company documents from the property during a search that continued for six hours as they

Google CEO Eric Schmidt

look into the allegations that Google illegally collected and stored personal data sent over unsecured Wi-Fi wireless networks. They unlawfully gathered communications records may include e-mail and instant messages, passwords and search histories, according to police.

It’s unlikely that the police will find anything meaningful from the haul as Google Korea says that the data collected from the Street View cars, which first appeared on the streets of Seoul in October last year, is stored in Google’s U.S. servers.
After analyzing the data from the hard drives, a process that may take more than a month, police officials are planning to bring in a number of Google Korea officials for questioning.

Street View allows users to see panoramic street scenes on Google’s digital photomaps. Google has been providing Street Views in a number of countries including the United States, Germany, Australia and Canada.

In May, Google admitted that its Street View vehicles, which have roaming Internet access and take photographs of cities in over 30 countries, ``accidentally’’ collected personal communications sent over public Wi-Fi systems in homes and offices, due to some rogue code in the software used by the service.

Google is increasingly coming under scrutiny for pushing legal and ethical lines related to personal privacy, as it desperately searches for new business models to combat emerging rival services, like Facebook (www.facebook.com), that are challenging its previously-undisputed online dominance. And there are critics who doubt Google’s claims that the information was gathered inadvertently.

But the raid on Google’s office here was unexpected, as the company has been talking closely with the Korea Communications Commission (KCC), the country’s broadcasting and telecommunications regulator, on how to handle the collected data and quell the fuss over privacy concerns.

Perhaps, the involvement of the police would have been inevitable at some point. The KCC, obviously not a law-enforcement body, has no legal rights to independently demand and seize communications records from private service providers for investigation, according to legal experts citing the country’s communications privacy law.

Apparently, this didn’t keep it from trying. And conversations with KCC officials hint that the regulator was focused more on retrieving the data from Google than destroying it.

``We needed specific knowledge of the information Google collected from local Wi-Fi networks and asked the company to submit the materials. The company replied that it would be possible to access the data through a network or a visit to its U.S.
headquarters, and these were the ongoing talks when the police raided Google’s Seoul office,’’ said an official from KCC’s network policy division, revealing that the regulator had considered requesting a police investigation into Google, although it had no prior knowledge of Tuesday’s raid.

``Google offered us access to some samples of the data it collected here should we visit the U.S. There is a need for us to analyze the content of the data, rather than just the list, to determine exactly what laws Google was breaking ... the discussions about whether to have the information destroyed or not could only come after that,’’ he said.
Google Korea officials were unavailable for immediate comment.

Google, from hero to villain

Korea is one of a dozen countries ― including the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Britain, and Australia ― that are investigating whether Google broke their privacy laws in pushing out the localized versions of Street View.

Google, which claims it has done nothing with the collected data, insists that the ``fragments’’ of information collected by the Street View cars are hardly meaningful. Some security experts, as well as the police here, suspect that sensitive information such as e-mail messages, passwords and Web browsing records may have been compromised.

It was just a year ago when Korean Internet users praised Google as a safe haven for privacy. This was after it opted to cripple the Korean version of its YouTube (www.youtube.com) online video service to resist government regulations that require Internet users to make verifiable real-name registrations for leaving comments on major websites.

Google has since struggled to protect its ``don’t be evil’’ motto here, with smartphone users expressing anger over the company’s supposedly lax support for its Android mobile platform. The fresh privacy debacle over Street View has its public relations officials avoiding their cell phones again.

There are increasing calls for Google to improve the way it handles sensitive data. A confidential Google document, a seven-page ``vision statement’’ that was recently unearthed by the Wall Street Journal, proves that the company has been conducting serious internal debates about ways to monetize its vast amount of users over the past few years.

The rise of Facebook, which wasn’t even mentioned in the 2008 document, has certainly stoked Google’s sense of urgency. Although the fear of a privacy backlash had prevented Google from pushing targeted advertisements based on particular Web behavior, Facebook has been using the personal information of its customers more liberally, which has allowed advertisers wider freedom in targeting ads more specifically.

The growing presence of social media services such as Facebook, which now has more than 500 million global users, is threatening to Google, as this proves that a rapidly-growing amount of the world’s information is being walled off from its search index.

Google will continue to consider more ways to monetize the vast amount of personal data it had collected and stored for years, but advocates are worried about increasing government scrutiny.

Chang Yeo-gyeong, an activist from the Jinbo Network, expressed concerns about the government’s attempts to acquire the Street View data. The Lee Myung-bak government has been considering more ways to monitor Web behavior and impose rules on Internet users, which include limiting online anonymity and subjecting websites to libel laws.

``The KCC receiving the Street View data could be dangerous as the data may include more than just e-mail messages, but Internet protocol (IP) addresses as well. There needs to be careful consideration on whether the KCC could be violating the communications privacy law,’’ she said.