Google violated Canadian privacy rights, says privacy commissioner

The Office of the Privacy Commissioner said Tuesday that Google Inc. contravened Canadian privacy law when it collected personal information from unsecured wireless networks for its Google Street View service. The commissioner’s investigation found the incident was the result of an “engineer’s careless error” and a lack of controls to ensure privacy law was respected. “Our investigation shows that Google did capture personal information—and, in some cases, highly sensitive personal information such as complete emails. This incident was a serious violation of Canadians’ privacy rights,” Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart said in a release. The commissioner said the personal information collected includes emails, email addresses, usernames and passwords, names and residential telephone numbers, and addresses. “Some of the captured information was very sensitive, such as a list that provided the names of people suffering from certain medical conditions, along with their telephone numbers and addresses,” the office wrote. “It is likely that thousands of Canadians were affected by the incident.” The office launched the investigation after Google revealed its cars had inadvertently collected data transmitted over wireless networks while photographing neighbourhoods for its Street View map service. Following the investigation, Stoddart recommended Google set up a governance model to ensure it complies with Canadian laws, enhances its privacy training for employees, designates a person responsible for privacy issues, and deletes the Canadian data it collected. The office will consider the matter resolved on Feb. 1, 2011 after confirming Google has implemented the recommendations. In a blog post earlier this year, Google said that an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project in 2006 wrote code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. That code was used a year later when Google began collecting information to identify WiFi networks. Alan Eustace, senior vice-president of engineering and research at Google, wrote that the cars were grounded as soon as the problem was discovered. “We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake," he wrote.

Google violated Canadian privacy rights, says privacy commissioner

Brief | October 19, 2010

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