The UK is tough on privacy—especially compared to the US. The MPs in Parliment could have found that Rupert Murdoch had committed some minor infractions in his oversight of the phone hacking scandal. Instead, the report released yesterday deems him, "not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company." Ouch! House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee member Tom Watson MP, a vehement critic of the Murdochs, said, at the presentation of the report, "More than any individual alive, he is to blame. Morally, the deeds are his. He paid the piper and he called the tune.… It is his company, his culture, his people, his business, his failures, his lies, his crimes, the price of profits and his power." Strong words (and a nice piece of oratory).
Slide over to the other side of the pond, and we see the US FCC tapping Google lightly on the wrist with a laughable $25,000 fine for obstructing their investigation into their own hacking scandal, the one that involved the capture of "payload data" by the company's fleet of roving Street View cars. Now, the UK's data protection watchdog, the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), has "told Out-Law.com that it is reviewing whether or not to take 'further action' against Google." Google has already suspended its ongoing Street View operations in Germany and India (and it paused and then restarted its data collection in Australia) in response to local government privacy concerns. Could the UK take it a step further?
The Google and News Corp. situations are different in many ways. Each individual cellphone hack by a News Corp. journalist (to use the term loosely) was an attempt to gather juicy bits about a given person for publication. Google's transgressions were on a scale a gazillion times larger, but not at all targeted. It's not clear that Google has, or ever had, any specific purpose in mind for that data. As I suggested in a recent post, within Google's scientific culture, the collection of data for its own sake is a core value.
If we look at Sergey Brin and Larry Page through the Trans-Atlantic Murdoch lens, will we come to the conclusion, as MP Watson has about Murdoch, that it is "their company, their culture, their people, their business, and their failures," that are responsible for the Street View breach of trust. I purposely left off "lies," and "crimes," because those words are sensationalist when applied to Murdoch, but misleading—and potentially libelous—when applied to Brin and Page.
The point is not whether Google's founders ordered personal data to be covertly collected. They clearly did not. Murdoch may never have asked anyone to hack a phone, but he created a corporate culture that made phone hacking seem like a reasonable competitive advantage that would achieve the company's objectives. Did Brin and Page do something parallel at Google?
The FCC report makes clear the precedent by which the "WiSpy" activity is not technically illegal: “The Wiretap Act provides, ‘It shall not be unlawful under this chapter or chapter 121 of this title for any person to intercept or access an electronic communication made through an electronic communication system that is configured so that such electronic communication is readily accessible to the general public,’” But if you ask an average person walking down the street about what Google did, their immediate response will be, "How can that be legal?"
So Google finds itself inside the letter of the law, but outside of the court of public opinion. As has been clear over the years through their product launches, Google understands big data, but has a tin ear for the social.
