Google's emergence over the past dozen years as the online search titan of cyberspace was initially accompanied by an unusual amount of 1960s-style peace, love and understanding rhetoric from its Silicon Valley founders. "Do no evil," we were told, was the company's mantra.
Circa 2010, its mantra appears to be, "Push the outer legal and ethical limits wherever we can." The British government this week became the latest government to rebuke Google for harvesting vast amounts of private information on individual computer users through its deployment of specialized, data-gathering vehicles to obtain street-view images to augment its online maps. The vehicles routinely intercepted and warehoused data from unsecured Wi-Fi systems — something Google refused to admit to British authorities for years.
Meanwhile, Google continues to face criticism from privacy groups over its stockpiling of vast amounts of consumer information gleaned from use of its search function, e-mail services and more.
Polling shows the public is strongly in favor of an "opt-in" system to allow private companies to gather such information, whether as directly as Google does or through the placement of "cookies" in hard drives, as thousands of online sites routinely do.
Instead, we have a weak, underpublicized "opt-out" system and a broad lack of public awareness about just how much individual information gleaned from Internet use is being stored by private entities. Meanwhile, there's also increasing evidence that Google, like other multibillion-dollar corporations, is using its political clout to thwart the public's will.
We hope this isn't the case in the United States. The California Legislature, for example, has passed several online privacy measures over the past eight years. It's time to address public fears with additional legislation.
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