Congressmen working on national intelligence and homeland security either don’t know how to secure their own home Wi-Fi networks (it’s easy!) or don’t understand why they should bother. If you live outside the Beltway, you might think the response to this problem would be to redouble efforts to educate everyone about the importance of personal responsibility for data security, starting with Congressmen and their staffs. But of course those who live inside the Beltway know that the solution isn’t education or self-help but… you guessed it… to excoriate Google for spying on members of Congress (and bigger government, of course)!
Consumer Watchdog (which doesn’t actually claim any consumers as members) held a press conference this morning about their latest anti-Google stunt, announced last night on their “Inside Google” blog: CWD drove by five Congressmen’s houses in the DC area last week looking for unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. At Jane Harman’s (D-CA) home, they found two unencrypted networks named “Harmanmbr” and “harmantheater” that suggest the networks are Harman’s. So they sent Harman a letter demanding that she hold hearings on Google’s collection of Wi-Fi data, charging Google with “WiSpying.” This is a classic technopanic and the most craven, cynical kind of tech politics—dressed in the “consumer” mantle.
The Wi-Fi/Street View Controversy
Rewind to mid-May, when Google voluntarily disclosed that the cars it used to build a photographic library of what’s visible from public streets for Google Maps Street View had been unintentionally collecting small amounts of information from unencrypted Wi-Fi hotspots like Harman’s. These hotspots can be accessed by anyone who might drive or walk by with a Wi-Fi device—thus potentially exposing data sent over those networks between, say, a laptop in the kitchen, and the wireless router plugged into the cable modem.
Google’s Street View allows you to virtually walk down any public street and check out the neighborhood Continue reading →
I spend a lot of my time as an Internet policy analyst railing against elitist suggestions that “ordinary” users are just too dumb to take care of themselves online, no matter how effectively technology empowers them to make decisions for themselves about the content they and their children consume, what data they allow to be shared about themselves on social networking sites or while browsing, etc. Indeed, Adam Thierer and I wrote a lengthy paper about What Unites Advocates of Speech Controls & Privacy Regulation? attacking such elitism when enforced by paternalist laws that assume everyone has the same values and that only the wise philosopher-kings of technology policy can possibly protect us all from our own stupidity.
But of course there
are plenty of stupid people in the world, and they often do very stupid things—like walking on the side of a highway with just a few feet between a noise barrier and passing cars just because “Google Maps told you to do so!” That’s essentially what Lauren Rosenberg claims in her very stupid lawsuit against Google, after she was hit by a passing car following directions from the beta walking directions tool in Google Maps—and despite the warning Google provided. Danny Sullivan tells the full story at SearchEngine Land, complete with photos that should have caused any reasonably prudent person to think, “Hey, what a minute, maybe that warning label I saw telling me the suggested route might lack sidewalks or pedestrian paths was actually there for a reason!”
Rosenberg seeks several hundred thousand dollars in damages from Harwood (the driver who hit her) and Google, asserting Google was negligent and failed to adequately warn her. The key policy issue this case raises is the same as in many, many aspects of Internet policy: How much disclosure is enough? As clearly shown by the photos in Danny’s post, Google did warn Rosenberg; so the real danger in this case is that the courts (or lawmakers in the future) could set ever-higher standards for increasingly obnoxious warning labels on websites than they would provide on their own. This reminds me of my all-time favorite warning label (on a collapsible baby stroller): “REMOVE BABY BEFORE FOLDING!” (A contest for similarly inane real-life warnings can be found here.) Continue reading →
Regular readers will know that Adam and I have been waging a lonely defensive action in the war on “Free!” (ad-supported) content and services online, pointing out that restrictions on data collection and use for advertising would ultimately hurt consumers by reducing funding for the sites they love (1, 2, 3, 4). In short, there is no free lunch! I’ve also written a number of posts this past week about the dangers inherent in antitrust regulation—arguing that government efforts to make online markets more competitive through antitrust tinkering generally do more harm than good (1, 2, 3).
These two debates have long shared a common thread: Some have argued that effects on privacy should become a part of antitrust analysis and those who consider Google to be “Big Brother” want Washington both to clamp down on data use (“baseline privacy legislation”) and to ramp up antitrust scrutiny of the company.
But a French company has opened a much more direct front in the War on “Free.” Bottin Cartographes has
sued Google for unfair competition (concurrence déloyale—literally, disloyal competition) and abuse of its market dominance. The case is a little more complicated than English language reports suggest: It’s not just that Google is giving away a product (Google Maps) that Bottin charges, or wanted to charge, for. Like Google, Bottin charges enterprise users. But Bottin complains that Google doesn’t show ads on the public version of Google Maps. (Neither does Bottin, but maybe that’s part of why they’re upset.) Bottin’s lawyer claims that Google’s “strategy is to capture the market and squeeze out the competition by creating a monopoly for itself.” He goes on to assert that Google is “ruining the market” for mapping services.
Bottin seeks half a million Euros (plus interest) in damages, but their lawyer insists: “It’s not a question of money. Either Google puts advertising on Google Maps or the company must be forced to pay damages and abide by the terms of fair competition.” The hearing is set for October 16.
This argument, crazy as it sounds, is one Google is likely going to have to fend off repeatedly in the coming years—and not just in Europe, where “unfair competition” is still very much about protecting competitors rather than consumers. Chris Anderson, author of the new book
Free, recently addressed this very issue. Anderson’s book describes multiple ways of supporting “Free” content and services.
Continue reading →
Congress has very wisely cancelled the National Reconnaissance Office’s proposed Broad Area Space-Based Imagery Collection (BASIC) satellite system. The proposal to build two new imaging satellites at a cost to taxpayers of $1.7 billion would have represented a major break from what is possibly the U.S. government’s most successful effort to promote space commercialization to date: buying the imagery it needs from commercial providers, who can also sell imagery to other buyers.
Five years ago, the idea that Internet users could pull up a satellite image of just about any location on the planet at a whim would have seemed ludicrous. Yet that’s precisely what websites like Google Maps and Microsoft’s Live Search offer today—for free! Desktop applications like Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and Google Earth offer even more advanced geospatial tools—again, for free. But of course this library of incredibly rich imagery didn’t just “fall out of the sky,” as they say. It was collected by a handful of expensive commercial remote sensing satellites whose construction was made possible by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency‘s (Wikipedia) extraordinarily successful “Nextview” program implemented under the Commercial Remote Sensing Policy of 2003. Rather than having the Federal government build its own satellites—and pay for the entire cost of the satatellites—the NGA very wisely chose to buy imagery from commercial providers in two ~$500 million, 4-year contracts with U.S. satellite imagery companies: DigitalGlobe in 2003 and OrbImage (now GeoEye) in 2004.
These long-term purchase agreements essentially made the U.S. Government the “anchor tenant” in a new class of remote sensing satellites, providing the initial funding for both companies to build and operate their satellites. But because the companies sell roughly half of imagery to foreign governments and commercial buyers like Google and Microsoft, these deals have saved U.S taxpayers money for the purchase of imagery for a wide variety of needs, ranging from agricultural monitoring to military intelligence. At the same time, the Nextview contracts have given birth to a vibrant geospatial industry whose immediate benefits should be obvious to anyone who’s ever pulled up a satellite map online and whose macroeconomic impact is potentially enormous.
So why mess with success? Continue reading →
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.