Germany Fines Google Over Street View - But Says €145k Is Too Small 106
judgecorp writes "Germany's privacy regulator has fined Google €145,000 over its Street View cars' harvesting of private data — but the official has complained that the size of the fine is too small, because of limits to the fines regulators can impose. German data protection commissioner Johannes Caspar said the fine was too low, for 'one of the largest known data breachers ever,' saying, 'as long as privacy violations can be punished only at discount prices, enforcement of data protection law in the digital world with its high abuse potential is hardly possible.' In 2010 it emerged that Google's Street View cars captured personal data from Wi-Fi networks as well as taking pictures — since then regulators have imposed a series of fines — the largest being $7 million reportedly paid to settle a U.S. government probe."
the general problem with fixed-size fines (Score:5, Informative)
If fines are intended as compensation, then fixed-size fines make sense. But if they're intended as a deterrent, they end up being completely ineffective for people or companies with a lot of money. A $10k fine might deter a small business, and a $100k fine will truly scare them, but for a Google-sized company those numbers are all noise, lost somewhere in the sushi budget.
If you really want to have effective deterrence, fines based on a percentage of annual income would be more effective. Some countries already do this with traffic tickets, to ensure that rich people have to care about getting a speeding ticket, rather than just laughing at the (to them) paltry amount.
Re:I Still Don't Get It (Score:5, Informative)
Europe has privacy laws that regulate what kinds of databases of user data you can compile. It's not an issue of cracking encryption, but that you simply cannot collect certain kinds of information, and the information you do collect has to be used in certain ways. The goal is to keep companies like Google or Facebook from doing what amounts to surveillance of the population.
Re:Why? (Score:5, Informative)
Mobile phone calls are encrypted. Maybe not very well, but a lock is a lock even if the door is made of cardboard. So that's different.
Re:They need to shut up and get over it. (Score:4, Informative)
Google came out themselves about the issue. If anything, these years of fighting over the issue should make companies not want to disclose voluntarily.
This article from Tech Eye [techeye.net] says that it the admission was forced by a request to audit from the German authorities. Do you have a more specific time line for this?
Re:They need to shut up and get over it. (Score:3, Informative)
Google came out themselves about the issue. If anything, these years of fighting over the issue should make companies not want to disclose voluntarily.
This is not correct, and I don't know why this re-written history keeps getting repeated on geek sites like Slashdot.
Google actually first guaranteed the German authorities that they were not collecting anything. And first after the German authorities despite this assurance still demanded a full audit of the data anyway, did Google do their disclosure (source: see link below).
This sequence of events was covered extensively in European press (one of many sources [guardian.co.uk]), and I don't know how mostly US geek sites ended up with and keep repeating an alternative version.