Police file charges against Google

Officials from the National Police Agency’s Cyber Terror Response Center (CTRC) show some of the hard disks taken from the office of Google Korea Thursday as they push their investigation into Google illegally collecting e-mail, passwords and other personal data over unsecured Wi-Fi networks further. The Korean police filed charges against the Internet giant’s U.S. headquarters, making the country the first to prosecute the company over its controversial Street View mapping service. / Yonhap

By Kim Tong-hyung

The privacy conflict between Seoul and Google took another step up the escalation ladder on Thursday with the Korean police filing charges against the Internet giant’s U.S. headquarters over lax privacy controls.

In May last year, Google admitted that its fleet of vehicles taking panoramic photographs for its “Street View” online mapping service around the globe inadvertently collected e-mails and passwords of computer users on unsecured wireless networks in various countries, including Korea.

This has resulted in Google being investigated in more than 20 countries since then, but Korea is the first to make the move to prosecute the company.

In addition to identifying Google as suspected of violating local laws, law enforcement authorities here will also seek for a suspended indictment of an unnamed Google programmer known to have designed the production systems of the Street View cars.

The eventual goal is to force Google to delete the unlawfully retrieved information of Korean users from its U.S. servers, according to police officials.

“This is a massive privacy breach case that involved an unprecedented number of wireless Internet users. The collected data, which not only included information of computers and smartphones, but also online credit card purchase records, was highly sensitive,” said an official from the National Police Agency’s cyber crimes unit.

In announcing the results of its investigation on Google last week, the Korean police concluded that the company breached the country’s telecommunication privacy laws with its unlawful data capture, which is claimed to have affected 600,000 Korean computer users.

Google had Street View vehicles roam several Korean cities — including Seoul, Busan, Incheon and Gyeonggi Province towns — from October 2009 to May last year, and the “mistakenly” collected data also included records of credit cards, location-based information and mobile devices, according to the Korean police.

Google, which says it has been cooperating with Korean telecommunications authorities and the police, expressed regret about the course of the investigation.

“While we have repeatedly acknowledged that the collection of payload data was a mistake, we are disappointed with this announcement as we believe Google Inc. and its employees did nothing illegal in Korea,” said Ross LaJeunesse, Google’s head of public policy and government affairs in Asia, in a statement that was first provided in Korean.

“The Cyber Terror Response Center (CRTC) today discussed the content of the payload data they reviewed. We cannot confirm any of the content of these disks, as we have not analyzed them out of respect for user privacy. As we have said before, based on the manner in which the Wi-fi data was collected, we believe that most of it is fragmentary, but in some instances entire emails and URLs could be captured, as well as passwords.”

경찰 구글 본사 입건

개인정보보호 문제를 둘러싼 한국정부와 구글간의 갈등이 악화되고 있다. 한국의 경찰은 목요일 허술한 개인정보 관리로 비판을 받고 있는 구글의 미국본사를 입건했다고 밝혔다.

구글은 지난해 5월 스트리트뷰 인터넷 지도 서비스를 제작하는 과정에서 보안되지 않은 무선 인터넷 망에서의 개인정보를 무단으로 수집해왔음을 인정하고 이는 의도되지 않은 것임을 주장하였다. 이후 20개가 넘는 나라들에서 조사를 받아왔는데 입건을 한 것은 한국정부가 처음이다.

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