Content Moderation Case Study: Google 'Removes' German Residences From Street View By Request (2010)

from the privacy-or-not? dept

Summary: Google's Street View is a powerful mapping tool that allows users to visit places they'll possibly never be able to visit and allows local users to see homes and businesses they're trying to locate.

But Google's Street View hasn't been warmly welcomed everywhere. In Germany -- a country with a long history of pervasive surveillance by government agencies -- Google’s mapping project hit a roadblock. In an effort to comply with German privacy laws, Google worked with data protection authorities to ensure all requirements were met before its cars and cameras hit the road.

Restrictions on data collection have resulted in Germany being one of the least-mapped countries in Europe.

After meeting with considerable public opposition to Google's street mapping, Google allowed residents to opt out. This resulted in opted-out locations being blurred in Street View, providing owners with more privacy inside Street View than they enjoyed outside it.

Decisions to be made by Google:

• Should the normal lack of an expectation of privacy in publicly-viewable areas override local restrictions on data-gathering?
• Is an opt-out plan cost effective (as compared to simply not mapping at all in restricted areas)?
• Do "holes" in map coverage increase risks to drivers and travelers? 
• Is there a possibility the opt-out function could be abused by trolls and/or opponents of Google's Street View project?

• Does following local privacy laws possibly make Google's Street View less useful than competing products that may not follow laws or that receive more deference from local authorities?
• Is the mapping project likely to run into greater resistance in the future, given world legislators' ongoing concerns with lax privacy laws?
• Could Google be considered culpable for harm resulting from incomplete maps, especially when coupled with Google's built-in live navigation software?
• What tools does Google have at its disposal to push back against legal restrictions?

The opt-out program also led to an unfortunate, unforeseen, and completely unintended consequence. A small group of rogue "transparency advocates" sought out "blurred" houses and egged them. Some of those who opted out were also treated to handwritten notes informing them that Google was "cool." Very little actual damage was done.

Despite the early opposition -- which resulted in Google shutting down its attempted mapping of Germany in 2011 -- Google has taken a second run at the country and its resistance to the Street View project. Its site lists a large number of German cities and towns that have recently been mapped by Google during its latest attempt, which began in July 2020 and will wrap up early next year. Google "removes" German residences from Street View by request (2010)

Filed Under: germany, google maps, maps, privacy, street view
Companies: google

Google Finally Settles Lawsuit Over Decade-Old WiFi Snooping Accusations

from the that-took-some-time dept

So if you've been around these parts for a while, you might remember a big stink back in 2006 or so when Google's Street View vehicles were found to have been hoovering up data collected via WiFi. The collection came while the company was collecting Street View data via its army of specially-configured vehicles, and included pretty much any and all unencrypted data traveling over those networks, including telephone numbers, URLs, passwords, e-mail, or video streams. The goal was purportedly to ensure better geographical positioning data, but the data collected went well beyond what was needed for that goal.

Initially, Google claimed that the data collection was accidental, something supported by engineering analysis at the time. Here's what Google said in 2010 about the issue:

"So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental Wi-Fi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google's Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data."

In 2012 however, an FCC document detailed how a Google engineer had created a system that collected this data intentionally, but had downplayed the privacy risk because Google Street View vehicles would not be "in proximity to any given user for an extended period of time," and "[n]one of the data gathered ... [would] be presented to end users of [Google's] services in raw form." And while the engineer was probably right that not much useful data was collected, doing so at all was admittedly not a bright idea, and the "mistake" wound up being an intentional, poor engineering choice signed off on by project managers.

Admittedly the real-world risk of the entire scandal was violently over-hyped. The moving vehicles only had access to hotspots as vehicles passed for a few seconds, frequent channel hopping reduced data collection further, and again, the entire effort only collected data from hotspots that didn't use encryption Still, it was a dumb decision any way you slice it.

Fast forward thirteen years after the data collection occurred, and Google has finally put the entire scandal to bed, at least here in the States. The company will wind up paying $13 million to settle a 2010 lawsuit over this data collection. Because the data is so fragmented, it's hard to actually identify whose data was collected during that period; so the payout will largely go to lawyers and a handful of privacy activism organizations:

"Lawyers for the plaintiffs said it would be difficult to identify masses of affected people, a decade later, from the random snippets of data that the company collected when its vehicles drove by their homes.

Instead, what’s left of the $13 million -- after administrative costs and the lawyers who brought the lawsuit get a commission of as much as 25% -- will be distributed to a handful of consumer privacy advocacy groups, according to a court filing detailing the terms of the deal."

While this scandal may have been over-hyped, it still managed to highlight how non-transparent privacy practices are, how companies have few reservations when it comes to misrepresenting what actually happened, and how long it takes to actually achieve anything even vaguely resembling accountability. Of course in the decade-plus since this scandal began, it has become abundantly clear that this sort of casual disregard for user privacy was always more of a feature than a bug, and we're still not doing a very good job coming up with a meaningful model for doing much of anything about it outside of hand-wringing and hysteria.

Filed Under: privacy, street view, wifi
Companies: google

Using AI To Identify Car Models In 50 Million Google Street Views Reveals A Wide Range Of Demographic Information

from the you-are-what-you-drive dept

Google Street View is a great resource for taking a look at distant locations before travelling, or for visualizing a nearby address before driving there. But Street View images are much more than vivid versions of otherwise flat maps: they are slices of modern life, conveniently sorted by geolocation. That means they can provide all kinds of insights into how society operates, and what the differences are geographically. The tricky part is extracting that information. An article in the New York Times reports on how researchers at Stanford University have applied artificial intelligence (AI) techniques to 50 million Google Street View images taken in 200 US cities. Since analyzing images of people directly is hard and fraught with privacy concerns, the researchers concentrated on a proxy: cars. As an academic paper published by the Stanford team notes (pdf):

Ninety five percent of American households own automobiles, and as shown by prior work cars are a reflection of their owners' characteristics providing significant personal information.

First, the AI system had to be trained to find cars in the Google Street Map images. That's something that's easy for humans to do, but hard for computers, while the next stage of the work -- identifying car models -- is much easier using AI. As another paper reporting on the research (pdf) explains:

the fine-grained object recognition task we perform here is one that few people could accomplish for even a handful of images. Differences between cars can be imperceptible to an untrained person; for instance, some car models can have subtle changes in tail lights (e.g., 2007 Honda Accord vs. 2008 Honda Accord) or grilles (e.g., 2001 Ford F-150 Supercrew LL vs. 2011 Ford F-150 Supercrew SVT). Nevertheless, our system is able to classify automobiles into one of 2,657 categories, taking 0.2 s per vehicle image to do so. While it classified the automobiles in 50 million images in 2 wk, a human expert, assuming 10 s per image, would take more than 15 y to perform the same task.

The difference between the two weeks taken by the AI software, and the 15 years a human would need, means that it is possible to analyze much larger data collections than before, and to extract new kinds of information. This is done by using existing datasets, for example the American Community Survey, which is performed by the US Census Bureau each year, to train the AI system to spot correlations between cars and demographics. The New York Times article lists some of the results that emerge from mining and analyzing the Google Street Map images, and adding in metadata from other sources:

The system was able to accurately predict income, race, education and voting patterns at the ZIP code and precinct level in cities across the country.

Car attributes (including miles-per-gallon ratings) found that the greenest city in America is Burlington, Vt., while Casper, Wyo., has the largest per-capita carbon footprint.

Chicago is the city with the highest level of income segregation, with large clusters of expensive and cheap cars in different neighborhoods; Jacksonville, Fla., is the least segregated by income.

New York is the city with the most expensive cars. El Paso has the highest percentage of Hummers. San Francisco has the highest percentage of foreign cars.

The researchers point out that the rise of self-driving cars with on-board cameras will produce even more street images that could be fed into AI systems for analysis. They also note that walking around a neighborhood with a camera -- for example, in a smartphone -- would allow image data to be gathered very simply and cheaply. And as AI systems become more powerful, it will be possible to extract even more demographic information from apparently innocuous street views. Although that may be good news for academic researchers, datamining offline activities clearly creates new privacy problems at a time when people are already worried about what can be gleaned from datamining their online activities.

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Filed Under: ai, privacy, street view
Companies: google

Google Fined For Wi-Fi Privacy Violations, Grandstanding German Regulators Not Satisfied

from the perspective dept

Google really screwed up when its Street View cars accidentally collected data from open wi-fi networks around the world, and it's a good thing that the practice came to light and people called them on it—but that's where the good sense of the situation seems to end. It's really important to keep some perspective here: Google collected open wi-fi data and didn't do anything with it. In terms of potential breaches of privacy permitted by the user's own lax security, I'd say the "victims" got off easy in this case. But from the way lots of politicians and news outlets tell the story, you'd never know it.

Though Google has mostly wrapped up the issue in the US, it is still dealing with the governments in other countries, and the latest news is that it has been fined €145,000 in Germany. Since that's pocket change to Google, frustrated regulators are calling for bigger weapons with which to slay the giant:

The country's data chief called it "one of the biggest known data protection violations in history".

But the regulator admitted the amount was "totally inadequate" as a deterrent to the company.

...

Under European regulations, the maximum fine for an accidental violation is 150,000 euros - but data protection supervisor Johannes Caspar called for that amount to be increased in future.

In a statement, the regulators said: "Among the information gathered in the drive-bys were significant amounts of personal data of varying quality. For example, emails, passwords, photos and chat protocols were collected."

Like so much of the response to the situation, a lot of this is political grandstanding spread by media outlets that are perfectly willing to make people paranoid about Google. Scrutinizing Google's privacy practices is definitely a good thing—this is a company a lot of people trust with a lot of data—and when they screw up, as they did here, they should face the consequences. But assuming they have villainous intentions in everything they do is foolish, and misrepresenting what happened here is wrong.

For starters, people love to list off the things Google collected—emails and passwords and the like—to imply that this was some sort of organized spying scheme. What they leave out is that the Street View cars were just arbitrarily recording bits of data they picked up from the open wi-fi networks, and while it certainly did include sensitive bits and bytes, there was no system or plan for actually looking through the contents of this data or making use of it. You might as well say the garbagemen have been collecting financial and government information, since there are plenty of sensitive documents in the trash.

Note the careful choice of words in calling this "one of the biggest known data protection violations in history." Maybe it is the biggest, in terms of sheer scale, but it earns no further superlatives. It's not the worst, nor the most damaging, nor the most secretive, nor even the most technologically advanced. Just the "biggest" in the most technical sense, which doesn't really mean much at all.

Then there's this idea that the fine is inadequate to deter Google. While any law based around fines is going to face the potential problem of rich people ignoring it, things are once again being blown out of proportion here. The regulators want to tell the story of the big, bad, deep-pocketed company that can defy the law with impunity, so that they can level bigger fines with more impressive headline dollar figures in the future—but that leaves out any discussion of whether the fine itself is appropriate. You can't tailor a fine to the richest potential violator of a law... What if it had been a small German startup hoping to create a local competitor to Street View that had made this mistake? Would privacy regulators still be calling for higher fines? For that matter, would they have pursued it at all, or just told them to knock it off?

Conversely, if Google or another company had actually made use of all that sensitive data—if they had read people's emails, or stolen anyone's credit card info ,or even made a text-file list of logins and passwords that was clearly intentional—then there would be other things to go after them for. You can bet they'd be facing big lawsuits and much more serious charges if there was even a hint of genuine fraud or hacking—but despite the best efforts of investigators in several countries, no such hint has been found. Google is facing a limited fine for the limited charge of collecting data because that's all it did. And let's still not forget that this was data on open wi-fi networks—no more secure than a CB radio, despite the tech-mystique that may surround it.

So let's keep holding Google to the highest standards of privacy, but let's not turn it into a witch-hunt. Accusing them of flagrant data-theft for what was in fact a technical oversight is bad for everyone. Apart from the fact that disinformation is always bad, placing all the blame on Google means failing to teach people about the nature of open wi-fi, meaning many of them are probably still leaving their data out there for anyone to see. And if nothing else, we certainly don't want to provoke that "well, if they're going to say we did it anyway...." mentality in Google.

Filed Under: germany, street view, wi-fi
Companies: google

Google Street View Is Invasion Of Privacy... But The BBC Showing Everyone At The Royal Wedding?

from the double-standards dept

This raises an interesting question on privacy and balance.

Google decided to blur the faces of ordinary people going about their ordinary activities caught on Street View.

The BBC have decided, where events like the Royal Wedding are concerned, it's fine to have high definition street shots showing the faces of ordinary people in the crowd; not to mention police officers, armed forces and - presumably - under-cover crowd security officers.

Filed Under: photographs, privacy, royal wedding, street view, uk
Companies: bbc, google

Google Pays The Borings $1 For 'Damages' From Having A Street View Car Enter Their Driveway

from the symbolically-boring dept

Filed Under: borings, street view
Companies: google

Blurred German Houses Get Egged By Google Street View Fans

from the your-house-is-not-blurred-in-real-life dept

Filed Under: germany, privacy, street view
Companies: google