This is the company who's former CEO, Eric Schmidt,
described Google's approach this way: "There is what I call the creepy line. The Google policy on a lot of things is to get right up to the creepy line and not cross it." The problem is that Google keeps crossing the line, both on the creepy and legal scale.
The latest example is a
Department of Justice report that Google lied about having the proper government security certification when it applied for a multi-million dollar government contract to sell its Google Apps for Government product to run email and online collaboration services for the Interior Department.
Mounting Legal Issues: The FISMA investigation follows just one week after Google agreed to a
settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over charges that the company used deceptive tactics and violated its own privacy promises to consumers when it launched its social network, Google Buzz, in 2010.
On top of lying to the Interior Department in applying for a contract and "privacy misrepresentations" to customers in the Buzz launch, you have the accumulated accusations of
antitrust violations and Congressional calls for followup investigations against the company. These complaints range from manipulating search results to shut out competitors, violating customer privacy for anti-competitive purposes, and exclusive deals to undermine competition. The Federal Trade Commission and Department of Justice are
already jockeying over who will lead the antitrust investigation of Google, even as Congressional leaders push for investigations, individual U.S. states are launching their own investigations, and Europe already has an antitrust inquiry moving forward.
Global Wi-Spy Privacy Investigations: And then there's the
Wi-Spy scandal, where Google snooped on millions of individuals' private emails and other personal information all over the world with Google Street View cars accessing information through private wi-fi routers. Not only did Google track, street-by-street, each wi-fi SSID name and MAC addresses for routers, they were scooping up full emails, instant messages and other data.
Other countries have already investigated Google and a number have convicted and sanctioned the company for its privacy violations.
France last month
found Google guilty of significant privacy violations through its wi-fi spying and fined the company for its actions.
The United Kingdom
concluded that Google's actions was a "significant breach" of the U.K. data protection law and required Google to sign a binding commitment to prevent future breaches and agree to an audit of its data protection practices.
Authorities in Spain, Canada, New Zealand and other countries have made similar findings, leading each to conclude that Google's conduct violated consumer privacy rights.
In May 2010, German prosecutors based in Hamburg opened a criminal investigation into Defendant's conduct.
This January in South Korea, police seized hard drives from Google and found Google's Street View project
had "harvested and stored hundreds of thousands of e-mails, instant messages and other personal data," including consumer passwords and consumer data, from 600,000 South Koreans,
When police anywhere are displaying your hard drives to the media like bricks of cocaine (see
linked picture from South Korea), your legal problems are spinning a bit out of control.
Coverup and Stonewalling: Adding to the anger at Google's actions have been a pattern of shading the truth and stonewalling when pressed for answers.
When Google first launched Street View in May 2007, it promised that "Street View only features imagery taken on public property." But people rapidly
began complaining that Street View images were showing intrusive images.
Google never mentioned plans to monitor any kind of electronic communications, and then when authorities discovered in 2010 that Google was collecting more than pictures, Google stonewalled investigators with minimal information.
Then Google claimed that it only collected "fragments" of such data. And when authorities began finding complete emails and other personal data in Google's data collected from homes, Google then argued that a single engineer was to blame for the global privacy breach against millions of people on six continents.
And then it turned out Google had
filed for a patent years ago to -- guess what? -- use accessing personal information on home wi-fi routers as a tool to strengthen its geolocation mapping systems. So the Wi-Spy concept was hardly the brainchild of a single engineer at Google.
When Google was caught in February collecting social security information from children participating in its national "Google Doodle" art contest, it just helped fuel further outrage.
How Bad it Could It Get? Google's whole business model is utterly dependent on trust -- on people and businesses trusting Google with their data and with the company being trusted as a fair arbiter of search results. If that cracks, whole sections of its business might fall apart.
In Germany, the backlash against Google's Street View project has been so strong that 240,000 Germans demanded the company obscure their homes from its database.
InfoWorld's Ted Samson
chalks up Google's continual rule skirting and lawbreaking to a "startup culture" where the company still has "insufficient internal checks and balances to prevent the powerhouse that is Google from inadvertently doing damage to its customers, its partners, and itself as it wields its might."
)
