That’s Carrier IQ’s claim, anyway.

Responding to a Washington Post report claiming that the company is the subject of an official FTC investigation, Carrier IQ said this is not the case. While it is meeting with federal regulators, the company says it is doing so proactively. It wasn’t summoned to Washington as part of a formal inquiry.

“This week CarrierIQ sought meetings with the FTC and FCC to educate the two agencies about the functionality of its software and answer any and all questions,” the company said in a statement given to AllThingsD. “Although Congressman Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), co-Chairman of the Bi-Partisan Congressional Privacy Caucus, has asked the Federal Trade Commission to investigate the practices of Carrier IQ, we are not aware of an official investigation into Carrier IQ at this time.”

In other words, there could be an official inquiry — the company just doesn’t know about it yet. And that may yet prove to be the case. The Washington Post says anonymous federal officials have confirmed the investigation, and the Post doesn’t often make such claims unless they’re bulletproof. So expect to hear more about this in the days ahead.

Related Posts on Carrier IQ:

• Exclusive Interview: Carrier IQ Gets Transparent About Its Mobile Monitoring
• Carrier IQ: How to Hack Back Your Phone
  
• Carrier IQ Speaks: Our Software Monitors Service Messages, Ignores Other Data
• Apple: We Stopped Supporting Carrier IQ With iOS 5
• RIM, HTC, Google on Carrier IQ: Blame the Carriers
• Carrier IQ Improves My Wireless Service by Logging My Keystrokes? Please Explain.

Full Carrier IQ Coverage »

Think about the federal government’s blocking of the $39 billion AT&T and T-Mobile merger and you might want to reread Google’s blog today, penned in reaction to the news that the Justice Department is making a second request for information about its $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility.

“This is pretty routine,” wrote Google’s Motorola integration exec Dennis Woodside. “We’ve gotten these kind of requests before.”

Maybe Google has (and it has with other purchases) — but in actuality, only four percent of transactions got such a follow-up request from regulators.

To be fair, it is much more common in high-profile, big-money deals like this one, but it means a longer closing period and more uncertainty around the Android mobile ecosystem until it’s done.

Still, Google has good reason to be patient. Despite tough criticism and brutal lobbying, it won approval from Justice for its $700 million deal to buy flight data service ITA Software in April, after nine months of scrutiny and a number of conditions imposed.

And the search giant waited out an intense six-month Federal Trade Commission approval process last year for its $750 million acquisition of mobile advertising start-up AdMob. It had an even harder time with the FTC’s nod of its 2007 DoubleClick purchase for $3.1 billion.

One that it lost — an obvious bridge too far that I dubbed Yahoogle — was Google’s 2008 effort to meld a troubling partnership with Yahoo in search advertising.

So, we’ll see soon enough which way D.C. — which just had Google Executive Chairman Eric Schmidt up to the Senate for an antitrust hearing chit-chat — will go.

Until then, here’s Woodside’s whole blog:

An update on our Motorola acquisition

Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 5:30 PM ET

Posted by Dennis Woodside, SVP Google

Since we announced our plans to acquire Motorola Mobility, we’ve been excited about the positive reaction to the proposed deal — particularly from our partners who have told us that they’re enthusiastic about our defense of the Android ecosystem.

And as David Drummond said when we announced our plans in August, we’re confident that this deal will be approved. We believe very strongly this is a pro-competitive transaction that is good for Motorola Mobility, good for consumers, and good for our partners.

That said, we know that close scrutiny is part of the process and we’ve been talking to the U.S. Department of Justice over the past few weeks. Today we received what is called a “second request,” which means that the DOJ is asking for more information so that they can continue to review the deal. (This is pretty routine; we’ve gotten these kind of requests before.)

While this means we won’t be closing right away, we’re confident that the DOJ will conclude that the rapidly growing mobile ecosystem will remain highly competitive after this deal closes. We’ll be working closely and cooperatively with them as they continue their review.

As reverse termination fees go, this one is massive. According to Bloomberg, it’s about 26 percent of the transaction’s enterprise value and more than six times the typical termination fee, which tends to be about 3.8 percent of the value of the deal to which it will be applied.

Why such a large fee? Presumably, Motorola Mobility demanded it out of concern that the U.S. Federal Trade Commission — which is already investigating several aspects of Google’s business — will hold up the deal or refuse to approve it.

Related posts

• Google: We’re Spending $12.5 Billion on Motorola to ‘Protect’ Android
• Motoogle: BOOM! The Mobile Business Just Got Completely Blown Up
• Google’s Motorola Deal Will Spur Antitrust Regulators to Action
• Watch Google Android Kingpin — and Motorola Acquirer — Andy Rubin Unplugged (Video)
• Defense Spending: Google Arms Itself With Moto Patents
• Is Google’s Motorola Deal the Break That Windows Phone Needed?
• Should Google Keep Motorola’s Patents and Sell Off the Hardware Business?
• Motorola Could Get Google Closer to Your Living Room — If the Cable Guys Play Along
• U.S. Carriers Silent on Motoroogle, but France Telecom Gives It a Thumbs Up
• Google-Motorola Deal Includes $2.5 Billion Reverse Termination Fee
• Google Can’t Say Hello To Hulu Now. (Can It?)
• More Google news
• More Android news
• More Motorola Mobility news

To say that Google is going to face some opposition to its proposed $12.5 billion acquisition of Motorola Mobility is what you might call a bit of an understatement.

First of all, the deal will give a lot of fresh meat to the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, which is already investigating several aspects of Google’s business, including its Android mobile operating system business. As The Wall Street Journal reported last week, investigators from the FTC and from the offices of several state attorneys general have been exploring whether or not Google prevents phone manufacturers who become Android partners from using the smartphone operating systems of other companies.

If such were the case, the party most likely to suffer would be Microsoft, whose Windows Mobile operating system is, like Android, widely offered to smartphone manufacturers. The other one that comes to mind is Hewlett-Packard, which is in talks with several companies about licensing its webOS software, which came from Palm, the handheld-making company it acquired last year.

The FTC’s investigation, said to have begun in June, is still in its early stages and may not result in a lawsuit. But you can bet that this proposed acquisition will only quicken the FTC’s pace.

The offices of several state attorneys general will also want to weigh in. The AGs in New York, California, Ohio and Texas have all ramped up inquiries into Google’s dominance of the search business.

Also in the mix is the European Commission. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Google faces no fewer than nine separate antitrust complaints in Europe. Most of those complaints have to do with Google’s search business, but at least one of them came from Microsoft, which complained in March that Google blocks competition in the Web search business.

Google is clearly sharpening its arguments for the coming fight. In the company’s official blog post announcing the deal, CEO Larry Page said Google will continue to work with other hardware companies on Android. The company says it works with 39 different manufacturers that build Android devices. But he also renewed a recent Google complaint that other companies are banding together to hurt Android by accumulating a pool of patents owned by Novell. That complaint touched off a war of words between Google and Microsoft.

In the blog post, Page insists that owning Motorola will not only give Android a kick, but will “enhance competition” and offer consumers “greater choice.” It will, of course, be interesting to see how that argument shapes up. The biggest question will focus on whether or not a Google-owned Motorola will get preferential access to new versions of Android before other manufacturers. Whatever happens, it’s going to take Google some time to get this deal done, and if it does get approved, you can expect some significant regulatory concessions.

Related posts

• Google: We’re Spending $12.5 Billion on Motorola to ‘Protect’ Android
• Motoogle: BOOM! The Mobile Business Just Got Completely Blown Up
• Google’s Motorola Deal Will Spur Antitrust Regulators to Action
• Watch Google Android Kingpin — and Motorola Acquirer — Andy Rubin Unplugged (Video)
• Defense Spending: Google Arms Itself With Moto Patents
• Is Google’s Motorola Deal the Break That Windows Phone Needed?
• Should Google Keep Motorola’s Patents and Sell Off the Hardware Business?
• Motorola Could Get Google Closer to Your Living Room — If the Cable Guys Play Along
• U.S. Carriers Silent on Motoroogle, but France Telecom Gives It a Thumbs Up
• Google-Motorola Deal Includes $2.5 Billion Reverse Termination Fee
• Google Can’t Say Hello To Hulu Now. (Can It?)
• More Google news
• More Android news
• More Motorola Mobility news

Six weeks after serving Google with broad subpoenas, FTC lawyers, in conjunction with several state attorneys general, have been asking whether Google prevents smartphone manufacturers that use its Android operating system from using competitors’ services, these people said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The precise focus of the review is not clear, but representatives of the FTC’s antitrust arm have requested information from a company called UberMedia Inc., which owns applications that let people read and send “tweets,” or messages, broadcast by Twitter users, this person said. Twitter considers UberMedia to be a potential competitor, people familiar with the matter have said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The company confirmed in a regulatory filing that it has indeed received a subpoena from the Federal Trade Commission. In a blog post, Google laid out how it sees things.

“At Google, we’ve always focused on putting the user first,” the company said in the post, written by Amit Singhal, one of the key creators of Google’s search business. “We aim to provide relevant answers as quickly as possible — and our product innovation and engineering talent have delivered results that users seem to like, in a world where the competition is only one click away.”

Singhal notes that Google is aware that its success would lead to greater scrutiny, but argues that everything it has done has been for the benefit of users, rather than to reduce competition. Singhal promises the company will aid in the inquiry.

“It’s still unclear exactly what the FTC’s concerns are, but we’re clear about where we stand,” he said. “Since the beginning, we have been guided by the idea that, if we focus on the user, all else will follow.”

It’s worth a read, as I suspect this is a topic we are going to be hearing a ton about in the coming months.

Here’s the full blog post:

At Google, we’ve always focused on putting the user first. We aim to provide relevant answers as quickly as possible — and our product innovation and engineering talent have delivered results that users seem to like, in a world where the competition is only one click away. Still, we recognize that our success has led to greater scrutiny. Yesterday, we received formal notification from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission that it has begun a review of our business. We respect the FTC’s process and will be working with them (as we have with other agencies) over the coming months to answer questions about Google and our services.

It’s still unclear exactly what the FTC’s concerns are, but we’re clear about where we stand. Since the beginning, we have been guided by the idea that, if we focus on the user, all else will follow. No matter what you’re looking for — buying a movie ticket, finding the best burger nearby, or watching a royal wedding — we want to get you the information you want as quickly as possible. Sometimes the best result is a link to another website. Other times it’s a news article, sports score, stock quote, a video or a map.

Instant answers. New sources of knowledge. Powerful tools — all for free. In just 13 years we’ve built a model that has changed the way people find answers and helped businesses both large and small create jobs and connect with new customers.

Search helps you go anywhere and discover anything, on an open Internet. Using Google is a choice — and there are lots of other choices available to you for getting information: other general-interest search engines, specialized search engines, direct navigation to websites, mobile applications, social networks, and more.

Because of the many choices available to you, we work constantly on making search better, and will continue to follow the principles that have guided us from the beginning:

• Do what’s best for the user. We make hundreds of changes to our algorithms every year to improve your search experience. Not every website can come out at the top of the page, or even appear on the first page of our search results.

• Provide the most relevant answers as quickly as possible. Today, when you type “weather in Chicago” or “how many feet in a mile” into our search box, you get the answers directly — often before you hit “enter.” And we’re always trying to figure out new ways to answer even more complicated questions just as clearly and quickly. Advertisements offer useful information, too, which is why we also work hard to ensure that our ads are relevant to you.
• Label advertisements clearly. Google always distinguishes advertisements from our organic search results. As we experiment with new ad formats and new types of content, we will continue to be transparent about what is an ad and what isn’t.
• Be transparent. We share more information about how our rankings work than any other search engine, through our Webmaster Central site, blog, diagnostic tools, support forum, and YouTube. We also give advertisers detailed information about the ad auction and tips to improve their ad quality scores. We’ve recently introduced even more transparency tools, announcing a major change to our algorithm, providing more notice when a website is demoted due to spam violations, and giving advertisers new information about ads that break our rules.
• Loyalty, not lock-in. We firmly believe you control your data, so we have a team of engineers whose only goal is to help you take your information with you. We want you to stay with us because we’re innovating and making our products better — not because you’re locked in.

These are the principles that guide us, and we know they’ll stand up to scrutiny. We’re committed to giving you choices, ensuring that businesses can grow and create jobs, and, ultimately, fostering an Internet that benefits us all.

The five-member commission is preparing to send Google the formal demands for information within days, the people said. Other companies are also likely to receive official requests for information about their dealings with Google at a later stage, they said.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The agency said on a notice on its Web site Thursday that groups have until July 11 to send suggestions on how its original guidelines on online advertising disclosures should be updated to address new technologies, such as those used to target ads to users’ interests and mobile advertising.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The agreement highlights the risks social media companies face as they navigate privacy and disclosure norms while providing consumer entertainment online. The settlement, a consent decree, reflects neither an admission or denial of the charges by the defendants.

The FTC said Playdom, now a Walt Disney Co. unit, and former executive Howard Marks disclosed information on hundreds of thousands of children between 2006 and 2010 as they operated 20 “virtual world” websites where users could access online games and other activities.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The agreement highlights the risks social media companies face as they navigate privacy and disclosure norms while providing consumer entertainment online. The settlement, a consent decree, reflects neither an admission or denial of the charges by the defendants.

The FTC said Playdom, now a Walt Disney Co. unit, and former executive Howard Marks disclosed information on hundreds of thousands of children between 2006 and 2010 as they operated 20 “virtual world” websites where users could access online games and other activities.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission’s interest in Apple’s new subscription service is at a preliminary stage, and might not develop into either a formal investigation or any action against the company. But it comes as Apple has attracted growing antitrust scrutiny in the U.S. and Europe.

A spokeswoman for the European Commission, the European Union’s executive arm, said Thursday that the commission was aware of the new subscription service and was “carefully monitoring the situation.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

“Verifying Google’s data snare is crucial to assessing a penalty and assuring no repeat. Consumers and businesses expect and deserve a full explanation, as well as measures shielding them from future spying. We will scrupulously safeguard the confidentiality of information we review.

“We will fight to compel Google to come clean–granting my office access to improperly collected materials and protecting confidentiality, as the company has done in Canada and elsewhere.”

– Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal Dec. 10, 2010

Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen has reassessed the need to review the consumer data inadvertently harvested by Google’s Street View cars and determined that it’s not quite as crucial as his predecessor claimed.

Jepsen said Friday that his office will enter into settlement negotiations with the company without reviewing the pilfered data, which Google has steadfastly refused to share with it. Under the terms of the deal between the two, Connecticut will drop the civil investigative demand it was using to force Google to produce the data at issue here, and Google will stipulate to collecting and storing it. It will also stipulate that the data collected included confidential and private information like “partial or complete e-mail communications.”

“This is a good result for the people of Connecticut,” Jepsen said in a statement. “The stipulation means we can proceed to negotiate a settlement of the critical privacy issues implicated here without the need for a protracted and costly fight in the courts, although we are ready to do so if we are unable to come to a satisfactory agreement through negotiation.”

PREVIOUSLY

• Well, Hell, If I Knew All I Had to Do Was Seize the Hard Drives…
• Look, Sergey, a Christmas Card From the Connecticut AG! Wait…
• Google Street View Privacy Debacle Far From Over
• FTC Closes Google Street View Probe
• Google CEO Apologizes for Street View Schmidtstorm
• Google CEO’s Advice to the Street-View Shy: The Video
• Schmidt: Don’t Like Google Street View Photographing Your House? Then Move.
• Mr. Schmidt, There’s an Inspector Lestrade on Line One
• State AGs to Probe Google’s “Deeply Disturbing Invasion” of Wi-Fi Data
• No Harm, Big Foul: Google Intercepted Passwords and Email Extracts
• Germany Questions Google’s Data “Mistake”
• Google Street View Cars Collected Wi-Fi User Data for Three Years

The move is a response to a call by the Federal Trade Commission for a “do not track” mechanism to let users decide not to allow advertising cookies to track their online movements for the purposes of personalizing the ads they see on the Web.

The Keep My Opt-Outs add-on installs easily enough in Chrome, though a few people who have installed it are complaining of problems with the Chrome browser in comments on the add-on’s Web site.

Given Chrome’s relatively small share of the browser market, on its face this is a marginal move. Google however says there will be more to come. It wants to make its add-on available for other browsers and will share the code with the rest of the world on an open-source basis.

Intel will pay Nvidia in five annual installments beginning Jan. 18, and in return will receive full access to Nvidia’s full range of patents, which had been part of the dispute. Nvidia will retain use of certain Intel patents that had also been in dispute.

“This agreement ends the legal dispute between the companies, preserves patent peace and provides protections that allow for continued freedom in product design,” said Doug Melamed, Intel senior vice president and general counsel, in a statement.

The fight had been over the terms of a 2004 agreement under which Intel granted Nvidia access to some of Intel’s technology for use in its chipsets, the chips that sit between the microprocessor and the graphics chip like connecting tissue. The cross-licensing agreement allowed Nvidia to make chipsets that were compatible with Intel microprocessors.

The trouble began in 2008, when Intel released its Nehalem generation of PC chips. The two companies disagreed over whether the 2004 agreement allowed Nvidia to make chipsets that would work with Nehalem chips and generations of chips that would follow. They filed dueling lawsuits in the Delaware Court of Chancery in early 2009. Intel asked a judge to rule that the agreement didn’t cover Nehalem and future generations of chips, while Nvidia sued for breach of contract, and sought to terminate Intel’s right to use some Nvidia patents that had been part of the agreement.

As I reported last December for Businessweek, the dispute caught the attention of the Federal Trade Commission, which added it to an antitrust complaint that was later settled.

The larger backdrop here is the growing threat Nvidia’s chips, known as graphics processing units (or GPUs), pose to Intel’s chips in servers and supercomputers. Engineers often refer to this as the CPU-GPU debate, where Intel’s chips are referred to as CPUs.

GPUs are common in most PCs, and usually handle the processing required to make games look good and run smoothly, working in concert with the CPU.

Since GPU chips do certain kind of math known as a floating point operation a lot faster than a CPU, they’re increasingly being used in systems that Intel has traditionally considered its primary domain: Heavy-duty financial modeling (oil and gas exploration is a good example). They’re also making a huge splash in the rarefied world of supercomputing: Nvidia GPU chips are being used in three of the top five systems on the elite Top 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. And as we all saw at CES last week, they’re starting to show up in tablet and other PC-like devices running Windows with the full support of Microsoft.

The dispute between them, which effectively put Nvidia out of the business of making chipsets that were compatible with Intel chips, certainly hurt. Though for Intel’s part, losing the Nvidia patents in question could have conceivably hurt its new Sandy Bridge chips, which combine a GPU and a CPU into one single component. Intel formally launched Sandy Bridge at CES last week.

And as recently as last week, sources familiar with the matter were saying that a new trial date was scheduled for February. Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang was careful not to directly answer a question about that from Mobilized’s Ina Fried in an interview at our D@CES event last week:

Intel and Nvidia had mysteriously withdrawn the case from the court’s calendar days before opening arguments were set to get underway on Dec. 6. Bloomberg News then reported that settlement talks were underway, though by mid-December there were signs that those talks had stalled, and sources said that a new trial date had been agreed to. That was until today, when sources at both companies started to drop hints that news was imminent.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110110/intel-will-pay-nvidia-1-5-billion-to-maintain-patent-peace/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110106/well-hell-if-i-knew-all-i-had-to-do-was-seize-the-hard-drives/ http://allthingsd.com/20110106/well-hell-if-i-knew-all-i-had-to-do-was-seize-the-hard-drives/#comments Thu, 06 Jan 2011 20:08:52 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=55248 Connecticut Attorney General Senator Richard Blumenthal must be beside himself. South Korea has managed to do what he so far has not: Analyze the consumer data harvested by Google’s Street View cars. And the results of that analysis do not bode well for the company’s relationship with the country.

According to South Korea’s Cyber Terror Response Center, the hard drives it seized from Google’s Seoul office last August contained a smorgasbord of consumer data. “We unlocked 79 computer hard disks seized from Google Korea last summer and discovered e-mails, instant messages and other private data sent over Wi-Fi networks,” Response Center official Jung Suk-hwa told the Korea Times. “We are now working on an additional 145 hard drives, which were handed over to us later. These disks had previously been taken out of the country.”

But whether those drives hold similar information or not, it’s already clear that Google violated South Korea’s law protecting telecommunications privacy. That said, it’s not immediately clear if the company will face a penalty for that. “We are looking to penalize whoever ordered and developed the program, but are unsure as of yet who that might be,” a police official told the Korea Herald. “Even after we confirm the identity of the suspect, we believe it will most likely be a U.S. citizen, and it is unclear whether the Korean Police Agency can prosecute those involved.”

An interesting remark, since Google has so far refused to identify the “rogue engineer” responsible for this whole Wi-Spy debacle. Perhaps if South Korea is able to do this, he or she can clarify things and confirm the veracity of Google’s explanation.

Google, for its part, trotted out yet another version of the same apologetic statement it’s issued in the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Britain….

“We are profoundly sorry for having mistakenly collected payload data from unencrypted networks. As soon as we realised what had happened, we stopped collecting all Wi-Fi data from our Street View cars and immediately informed the authorities. We have been co-operating with the Korean Communications Commission and the police, and will continue to do so. Our ultimate objective remains to delete the data consistent with our legal obligations and in consultation with the appropriate authorities.”

PREVIOUSLY

• Look, Sergey, a Christmas Card From the Connecticut AG! Wait…
• Google Street View Privacy Debacle Far From Over
• FTC Closes Google Street View Probe
• Google CEO Apologizes for Street View Schmidtstorm
• Google CEO’s Advice to the Street-View Shy: The Video
• Schmidt: Don’t Like Google Street View Photographing Your House? Then Move.
• Mr. Schmidt, There’s an Inspector Lestrade on Line One
• State AGs to Probe Google’s “Deeply Disturbing Invasion” of Wi-Fi Data
• No Harm, Big Foul: Google Intercepted Passwords and Email Extracts
• Germany Questions Google’s Data “Mistake”
• Google Street View Cars Collected Wi-Fi User Data for Three Years

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110106/well-hell-if-i-knew-all-i-had-to-do-was-seize-the-hard-drives/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20101221/u-s-regulators-approve-intels-perplexing-acquisition-of-mcafee/ http://allthingsd.com/20101221/u-s-regulators-approve-intels-perplexing-acquisition-of-mcafee/#comments Tue, 21 Dec 2010 19:41:41 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://newenterprise.allthingsd.com/?p=898 The Federal Trade Commission today approved a $7.7 billion deal by Intel, the world’s largest maker of computer chips, to acquire McAfee, the security software maker.

The deal, which once approved would amount to the largest deal in Intel’s history, still faces scrutiny by the European Union’s antitrust regulators, who have expressed concerns. This is of course the group that handed down the largest antitrust fine in its history against Intel. An appeal by Intel against that fine is pending.

I still find this combination a little confusing. I certainly see the need for Intel to grow its business beyond its core of providing the world’s personal computers and servers with microprocessors, and to add security features to future chips. But making chips is what it does best, and history has shown that when Intel deviates from what it does best it often regrets it later.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101221/u-s-regulators-approve-intels-perplexing-acquisition-of-mcafee/feed/ 1 http://allthingsd.com/20101210/look-sergey-a-christmas-card-from-the-connecticut-ag-wait/ http://allthingsd.com/20101210/look-sergey-a-christmas-card-from-the-connecticut-ag-wait/#comments Fri, 10 Dec 2010 19:37:28 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=54184 Google’s amends for inadvertently harvesting consumer data with its Street View cars may have been good enough for the Federal Trade Commission, but not for Connecticut attorney general Richard Blumenthal. Working with the Connecticut Department of Consumer Protection, his office has issued a civil investigative demand, hoping to force the company to turn over the personal data it collected and to which it has so far refused him access.

“We need to verify what confidential information the company surreptitiously and wrongfully collected and stored,” Blumenthal said in a statement, adding that doing so is “crucial to assessing a penalty and assuring no repeat.”

Though Google has already shared some of the data with other regulatory authorities, it evidently sees little need for such verification and clearly has no intention of handing any data over to Blumenthal’s office.

“As we have said before, we are profoundly sorry for having mistakenly collected payload data from unencrypted networks,” the company said in a statement rehashing the endless string of similar statements that preceded it. “As soon as we realized what had happened, we stopped collecting all WiFi data from our Street View cars and immediately informed the authorities. We did not want and have never used the payload data in any of our products and services. We want to delete this data as soon as possible and will continue to work with the authorities to determine the best way forward, as well as to answer their further questions and concerns.”

Google has until Dec. 17 to give Blumenthal’s office access to the data. Or else…

PREVIOUSLY

• Google Street View Privacy Debacle Far From Over
• FTC Closes Google Street View Probe
• Google CEO Apologizes for Street View Schmidtstorm
• Google CEO’s Advice to the Street-View Shy: The Video
• Schmidt: Don’t Like Google Street View Photographing Your House? Then Move.
• Mr. Schmidt, There’s an Inspector Lestrade on Line One
• State AGs to Probe Google’s “Deeply Disturbing Invasion” of Wi-Fi Data
• No Harm, Big Foul: Google Intercepted Passwords and Email Extracts
• Germany Questions Google’s Data “Mistake”
• Google Street View Cars Collected Wi-Fi User Data for Three Years

[Image credit: Someecards]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101210/look-sergey-a-christmas-card-from-the-connecticut-ag-wait/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101201/ftc-backs-do-not-track-system-for-web/ http://allthingsd.com/20101201/ftc-backs-do-not-track-system-for-web/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 22:40:24 +0000 Julia Angwin and Jennifer Valentino-DeVries http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=33333 The Federal Trade Commission unveiled a report on Internet privacy Wednesday that calls for the development of a do-not-track system that would enable people to avoid having their actions monitored online, a move the online-advertising industry has opposed.

“Industry must do better,” the FTC staff report states. “Many companies–both online and offline–do not adequately address consumer privacy interests.”

David Vladeck, director of the FTC’s bureau of consumer protection, said in a speech Wednesday at the National Press Club that it is too hard for people to avoid being tracked online, particularly as tracking companies are constantly developing new methods.

“We will not tolerate a technological arms race that aims to subvert consumer choice,” Mr. Vladeck said. “We have to simplify consumer choice, and a do-not-track option can achieve that goal.”

Read the rest of this post on the original site

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101201/ftc-backs-do-not-track-system-for-web/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101110/52251/ http://allthingsd.com/20101110/52251/#comments Wed, 10 Nov 2010 11:38:39 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=52251 The Federal Trade Commission may have closed its inquiry into the collection of user data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks by Google’s Street View cars, but the scrutiny continues–and now Google’s relationship with the White House is a target as well.

In a letter to the House Oversight Committee, The National Legal and Policy Center (NLPC) called for further investigation of the breach, suggesting that the FTC may have let Google off easy because of the company’s close ties to the Obama administration.

“Like Halliburton in the previous administration, Google has an exceptionally close relationship with the current administration,” the letter says, noting former Googler Andrew McLaughlin’s new gig as U.S. deputy chief technology officer and President Obama’s recent appearance at a Democratic fundraiser held by Google exec Marissa Mayer. “The FTC’s decision to close its investigation into Google’s unauthorized gathering of private data through its Google Street View program is troubling enough. But looked at in the context of this administration’s extraordinarily close relationship with Google, no fair-minded person could look at the record so far and not believe that further investigation is warranted.”

Maybe, maybe not. That Halliburton quip sure does sting though, given Google Senior Competition Counsel Dana Wagner’s infamous comments about the company last summer. “There are a lot of companies in which I wouldn’t do this job, right?” he said at the time. “I spent seven years in the government. I very much believe in the message and the mission of the Justice Department. I would not be doing this at Halliburton, right?…The sense that I get is that their corporate values may be a little different from Google’s, on some things.”

Incidentally, the NLPC may get its wish–Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas) last week told C-SPAN he plans to investigate the Google Street View privacy breach if he becomes chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

PREVIOUSLY

• FTC Closes Google Street View Probe
• Google CEO Apologizes for Street View Schmidtstorm
• Google CEO’s Advice to the Street-View Shy: The Video
• Schmidt: Don’t Like Google Street View Photographing Your House? Then Move.
• Mr. Schmidt, There’s an Inspector Lestrade on Line One
• State AGs to Probe Google’s “Deeply Disturbing Invasion” of Wi-Fi Data
• No Harm, Big Foul: Google Intercepted Passwords and Email Extracts
• Germany Questions Google’s Data “Mistake”
• Google Street View Cars Collected Wi-Fi User Data for Three Years

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101110/52251/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101104/ftc-gives-ed-felten-freedom-to-tinker/ http://allthingsd.com/20101104/ftc-gives-ed-felten-freedom-to-tinker/#comments Thu, 04 Nov 2010 18:55:20 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=51992 Looks like the Federal Trade Commission got its first choice of Chief Technologist, because it’s hard to think of anyone better to serve in that capacity than Princeton computer science professor Ed Felten, a guy whose CV makes everyone from Microsoft to Diebold shudder in embarrassment. A renowned computer researcher, Felten has over the years led charges against some of technology’s most ill-starred concepts, chronicling them in his widely read Freedom to Tinker blog.

In 2000, his team dropped the hammer on the Hack SDMI challenge by demonstrating how easy it was to crack the decidedly mediocre Secure Digital Music Initiative.

Dragged into the Sony BMG CD copy-protection scandal in 2005, he discovered that Sony’s “fix” for the Digital Rights Management rootkit it used to protect some new music CDs furthered inflamed an already bad situation.

And then, of course, there were Felten’s various investigations into electronic voting machines, the most notorious being the one that revealed Diebold’s machines could be opened with a standard office furniture key. “The access panel door on a Diebold AccuVote-TS voting machine–the door that protects the memory card that stores the votes, and is the main barrier to the injection of a virus–can be opened with a standard key that is widely available on the Internet,” Felten wrote at the time. “The exact same key is used widely in office furniture, electronic equipment, jukeboxes, and hotel minibars.”

Thank God for Felten, right?

And thank God the FTC has seen fit to hire him. There’s a lot of good he can do there. As Felten described it, “My main job will be to advise the FTC leadership on technology policy issues. My goals are use my technical expertise and knowledge of the tech world to help the FTC make the best decisions on tech topics, and to contribute to building up the agency’s technical capabilities.”

Said FTC Chairman Jon Leibowitz, “Ed is extraordinarily respected in the technology community, and his background and knowledge make him an outstanding choice to serve as the agency’s first Chief Technologist. He’s going to add unparalleled expertise on high-technology markets and computer security.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101104/ftc-gives-ed-felten-freedom-to-tinker/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101029/tk/ http://allthingsd.com/20101029/tk/#comments Fri, 29 Oct 2010 10:30:37 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=51630 Much as Google would like Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal to follow the Federal Trade Commission’s lead and close his inquiry into the inadvertent collection of user data by its Street View cars, that seems unlikely. Blumenthal, whose office is spearheading a multistate investigation into Google’s Wi-Fi data-gathering debacle, says he has no plans to end it simply because of some announced improvements to the company’s privacy practices.

“Google’s alarming admission last week–confirming it collected entire emails and passwords–only heightened our concerns about how and why this data was collected,” Blumenthal said, adding that he’d rather not “rely on Google’s explanations and assurances…to confirm the facts about how this happened and how consumers will be protected going forward.”

A wise move, I think, particularly given the way Google’s narrative for this particular cock-up has evolved over the past few months, from an outright denial in April to a backpedaling, embarrassing admission in May and finally an apology in October.

In April, an outright denial:

Writing in Google’s European Public Policy blog, Peter Fleischer, the company’s global privacy counsel, denies there was a privacy issue with Google’s Wi-Fi data collection practices. “Google does not store or collect payload data,” he says.

Google product manager Raphael Leiteritz reiterates this assertion in the company’s Submission to Data Protection Authorities that same day. “All data payload from data frames are discarded, so Google never collects the content of any communications,” he writes.

In an interview with the New York Times a few days later, Google spokesman Kay Oberbeck dismisses the privacy concerns of German officials, saying: “What we are doing is totally legal and is being done by other companies around the world….We did not mention the WLAN project during our discussions with data protection officials because it is not related to Street View.”

In May, an embarrassing admission…

Writing in Google’s official blog two weeks later, Google SVP Alan Eustace reveals that the company actually had been collecting payload data. “It’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e., non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks,” he explains. “So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake.” Then there was this from Peter Barron, Google’s director of communications for Northern and Central Europe: “We didn’t want to collect this data in the first place and we would like to destroy it as soon as possible.”

…followed by some aggressive damage control and a downplaying of the issue:

Speaking at Google’s annual Zeitgeist Europe forum, Google CEO Eric Schmidt describes the payload data collected as inconsequential and excuses the company for its misstep, saying, “There was no harm, no foul.”

In June, an unsettling hypothesis:

Apologizing for the company’s mistaken collection of user data, a Google New Zealand spokesperson tells the Otago Daily Times that the information the company’s Street View cars intercepted might not have been as inconsequential as Schmidt claimed. “Our in-car WiFi equipment automatically changes channels five times a second,” she says. “That said, it’s possible that the fragments of data we collected could contain entire emails or other content if a user broadcast personal information over an open network at that moment.”

In October, some hard evidence, another embarrassing admission and a change of tack…

A few months pass, and then a Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s investigation reveals “that Google did capture personal information–and, in some cases, highly sensitive personal information such as complete emails.” Interestingly, in its report on the matter, the Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s office notes that while Google “does not intend to resume collection of Wi-Fi data through its Street View cars…[it does intend to] rely on its users’ handsets to collect the information on the location of Wi-Fi networks that it needs for its location-based services database.”

And then the Schmidtstorm:

Appearing on CNN’s “Parker Spitzer,” Google CEO Schmidt cavalierly suggests that folks worried about Google Street View invading their privacy should “just move.” Ironically, he says this on the very day that Google admits those cars captured more than just fragments of personal payload data and says it is “mortified by what happened.”

Schmidt apologizes for his remark the next day:

“As you can see from the unedited interview, my comments were made during a fairly long back and forth on privacy,” he says. “I clearly misspoke. If you are worried about Street View and want your house removed please contact Google and we will remove it.”

And a day later the FTC announces that it has concluded its inquiry into Google Street View, saying the improvements Google has made to its internal privacy practices have alleviated its concerns for consumer safety.

Meanwhile, Blumenthal’s investigation continues.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101029/tk/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101027/ftc-closes-google-street-view-probe/ http://allthingsd.com/20101027/ftc-closes-google-street-view-probe/#comments Wed, 27 Oct 2010 20:08:01 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=51509 Looks like Google’s “no harm, no foul” explanation for the inadvertent collection of user data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks by its Street View cars was good enough for the Federal Trade Commission. The agency today closed its inquiry into the mapping service, saying the improvements Google has made to its internal privacy practices have alleviated its concerns for consumer safety.

“…We note that Google has recently announced improvements to its internal processes to address some of the concerns raised above, including appointing a director of privacy for engineering and product management; adding core privacy training for key employees; and incorporating a formal privacy review process into the design phases of new initiatives,” David Vladeck, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection, said in a letter to Google’s attorney. “The company also publicly stated its intention to delete the inadvertently collected payload data as soon as possible. Further, Google has made assurances to the FTC that the company has not used and will not use any of the payload data collected in any Google product or service, now or in the future. This assurance is critical to mitigate the potential harm to consumers from the collection of payload data. Because of these commitments, we are ending our inquiry into this matter at this time.”

Looks like Google won’t face any fines for the incident in the U.S., though it’s still subject to investigations abroad.

PREVIOUSLY

• Google CEO Apologizes for Street View Schmidtstorm
• Google CEO’s Advice to the Street-View Shy: The Video
• Schmidt: Don’t Like Google Street View Photographing Your House? Then Move.
• Mr. Schmidt, There’s an Inspector Lestrade on Line One
• State AGs to Probe Google’s “Deeply Disturbing Invasion” of Wi-Fi Data
• No Harm, Big Foul: Google Intercepted Passwords and Email Extracts
• Germany Questions Google’s Data “Mistake”
• Google Street View Cars Collected Wi-Fi User Data for Three Years

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101027/ftc-closes-google-street-view-probe/feed/ 0