Google balks at German Wi-Fi data deadline
The New York Times and Financial Times reported that Google missed a Wednesday deadline to turn over the data it collected from unsecured Wi-Fi networks by its Street View cars, a practice which Google has said was done inadvertently but has raised the hackles of critics and privacy advocates. Google did provide German authorities with a written explanation of how the incident occurred, according to the AP, but it's declining to provide the actual data citing, of all things, data protection laws.
"We want to cooperate with [the Hamburg information commissioner's] requests... but as granting access to payload data creates legal challenges in Germany, which we need to review, we are continuing to discuss the appropriate legal and logistical process for making the data available. We hope, given more time, to be able to resolve this difficult issue," the Financial Times quoted Google as saying. Some privacy groups, while criticising Google for collecting the data, appear to agree that turning that over to governments at this point is not that much better than having it stored by a private company.
