A dispute in Australia between members of the public and photographers gathering data for Google’s Street View service has been referred to the country’s police, the country’s Attorney General (senior law officer) has said.

Robert McLelland told journalists ahead of a conference on internet security in the Australian city of Melbourne, that the Federal Police were looking into complaints from members of the public that concern a possible breach of the country’s telecommunications laws.

Google said it would co-operate with the Australian police investigation, and a spokeswoman told Reuters that the company had made an error: “This was a mistake. We are talking to the appropriate authorities to answer any questions they have,” she said.

The ‘Street View’ service has recently been criticised in several countries. The company has said it inadvertently picked up personal data from some unencrypted wi-fi services over several years.

The search giant’s admission that it recorded private communications sent over unsecured wireless networks brought an immediate call from the German data protection commissioner, Peter Schaar, for a detailed investigation. 

He alleged in The Financial Times that “one of the largest companies in the world, the market leader on the internet, simply disobeyed normal rules in the development and usage of software.”

In the US, the Federal Trade Commission was believed to be close to announcing its own inquiry into the matter, according to people who spoke to agency officials. 

An inquiry could look at whether the collection of data breached rules on unauthorised access to computers and private communications, according to privacy campaigners. 

“This may be one of the most massive surveillance incidents by a private corporation that has ever occurred”, said Marc Rotenberg, leader of the Electronic Privacy Information Centre in Washington. 

A few days before this revelation, Google had reversed earlier assertions denying that it had monitored and collected data on individuals’ activity. 

It said the data was inadvertently culled as a fleet of camera-equipped Street View vehicles, which take pictures for the group’s imaging services, assembled a database of electronic WiFi addresses intended to enhance its maps and other location services. 

Google said the project leaders ignored that the vehicles were also taking in snippets of activity on the WiFi networks. 

“We didn’t want to collect this data in the first place and we would like to destroy it as soon as possible,” said Google’s spokesman Peter Barron. 

The data in question had never been available to outsiders, the company said. 

Ilse Aigner, the German minister for consumer protection, said the new revelation “is alarming and yet another proof that privacy protection is still alien to Google.” 

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office said that Google appeared to have breached the data protection act. 

But it added that after receiving assurances from Google that it would delete the data “as soon as reasonably possible”, the commissioner would not be taking further action against the company. 

The Google controversy follows a recent uproar over Facebook’s erosion of privacy settings. 

“Both Google and Facebook have given the privacy groups an unsolicited contribution,” said Jeff Chester of the Center for Digital Democracy. 

A working party looking into the use of images of private property on Google's enhanced Street View service has asked the internet giant to shorten the period of time for which it retains images taken by its camera teams for posting on its website.

The EU justice commission-established group wants to restrict the length of time Google can keep these images to six months, according to a Reuters report. It says that it currently dispenses with them after a year.

Many people have criticised the service as it shows unobscured views of private property, and say Google has set its cameras so that they can see over walls and hedges.

Google’s global legal advisor, Peter Fleischer, was written to by the European Commission, which asked that it should halve the length of time it holds onto these images, to six months.

In its letter, the working group said it “believes that a maximum retention of six months for the unblurred copies of the images would strike the right balance between the protection of privacy and the ability to eliminate false positives.”

European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding reiterated the EU’s intention to be vigilant in safeguarding the high standards of data protection which she believes the Union sets.

“I expect that all companies play according to the rules of the game,” she said in a statement.

Concern has been expressed among internet experts following Google’s conviction for abusing the privacy of an autistic teenager who was the subject of a bullying attack which was posted on its video channel.
Google itself said it was “outraged” by the ruling, which resulted in three of its employees receiving six-month suspended prison sentences. A fourth defendant was acquitted.
The trio were convicted of violating the privacy of the subject of the video, but acquitted of charges of defamation.
Commentators have been left concerned that the ruling could set a precedent meaning that website owners are responsible for every piece of content posted on their sites, leaving them facing a massive task of policing everything they publish, including material innocently distributed from third parties.
David Drummond, Google’s chief legal officer and one of those convicted, said: “I intend to vigorously appeal this dangerous ruling. It sets a chilling precedent.”
“If individuals like myself and my Google colleagues who had nothing to do with the harassing incident, its filming or its uploading onto Google Video can be held criminally liable solely by virtue of our position at Google, every employee of any internet hosting service faces similar liability,” he added.
Richard Thomas, the UK’s former information commissioner and consultant to privacy law firm Hunton & Williams, said the case was “ridiculous”.
“It is like prosecuting the post office for hate mail that is sent in the post,” he told BBC News.
“I find it worrying that the chief privacy officer who had nothing to do with the video has been found guilty. It is unrealistic to expect firms to monitor everything that goes online.”
Google has said that, despite the ruling, it has no intention of pulling out of Italy.

Lee Dryburgh who year after year has been organising the Emerging Communications Conference has alerted the members of Facebook group to the talk on the future of mobile technology posted by Mark Rolston of Frog Design. The talk at the 2009 eComms conference (San Francisco, 3-5 March) is now up, and more will come in future. However, this one talk already touches on several questions that we have seen ourselves debating in the recent past. One of these is privacy, and with the news that the UK’s government is seriously considering to tap into emails, phone calls and Facebook profiles, the issue can hardly be any more problematic.

In the words of Mark (who says he is not on Facebook), people are unconsciously waiting for the digital Pearl Harbor to happen in order to begin to reconsider (revisit, rethink, etc) the notion of privacy. He envisages something truly heinous occuring to the vast amounts of personal information already available on the Internet, for individuals, organisations and governmental bodies to start working together on finding the ways to establish the guidelines for sharing of personal data.

Mark’s vision of the evolution of social networking also seemingly goes against the currently suggested model of powerusers. Facebook is now for Social Networking what AOL used to be for the Internet… but we know where AOL is now. For Mark, the future is in elaborating on the set of standards rather than building up another master control scheme.

Similarly, in terms of technical developments, Social Networking future is not in the one-stop devices, but rather in revamping the power of email communications and “dirtying up” email services with opportunities for social interaction. As for the business potential behind it all, to quote Mark, “a lot of people are talking, but not a lot is being said”. This kind of confirms my feeling that the talk about Twitter business model has reached its saturation point (would it not, at 67 thousand Google results??)

The points above come from the Q&A session. The talk itself focuses entirely on how the evolution of mobile technologies has been making us rethink our communication flow, as well as the opportunities to (re)invent the world. Oddly, the boundary between physical and virtual is blurring more and more, while diverse and sundry devices become placeholders rather than facilitators of communication. This culminates in the absurd situation when a guy can think of any possible virtual means to get attention of his would-be girlfriend, totally forgetting to knock on the door.

All in all, this reminded me of this blog post about the ‘social’ media monster by Aaron Wall of SEO Book, in which the audience heartily debated the problem Twitter presents for SEO, and linkbuilding in particular.  Twitter, like many other Social Media tools, is great as a part of a concerted marketing effort, but alone it is that very public chit-chatting service, as some tabloid newspapers recently wanted us to think. What this monster – Internet and mobile technologies combined – achieves is that it lets us assess our ability to remain ourselves, instead of jumping on bandwagon each and every time.