German watchdog fines Google €145,000 for Street View privacy breach

German regulators have fined internet giant Google €145,000 euros ($189,700), for illegally collecting personal data during its Street View project, one of the biggest fines imposed over data protection rule violation in the country's history.

The fine slapped by the Hamburg data protection office comes after it was found that Google's Street View cars had taken city snapshots between 2008 – 2010 for its map service, and also illegally collected data from open Wi-Fi networks.

"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," the Hamburg authorities said in a statement.

Google had claimed that its Street View team was unaware of the collection and never looked at the data that was collected illegally, but the Hamburg regulator said that Google had "negligently and without authorisation" captured and stored personal information.

''In my estimation this is one of the most serious cases of violation of data protection regulations that have come to light so far," said Johannes Caspar, Hamburg commissioner for data protection and freedom of information.

Caspar said that although Google said it was not the company's intention to store personal data, the fact that it went on for a long period of time shows that Google's internal control mechanisms failed seriously.

Google's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, said in a statement that the Street View team never wanted the collected data, that they did not use it or even look at it.
"We work hard to get privacy right at Google," he said. "But in this case we didn't, which is why we quickly tightened up our systems to address the issue."

The Hamburg regulator fined Google €145,000, a pittance for the search engine giant, which has annual turnover of $50.2 billion and market value of around $264 billion.

Google's Street View troubles are not limited to Germany. It was fined $142,000 for violation of privacy laws in France in 2011 and a $7-million last month to settle an investigation by 38 US states and the District of Columbia for similar charges as framed by the German watchdog.

Some analysts say though privacy laws differ across countries few people, concerns over privacy matters in the context of imagery of public streets seems to be a somewhat misplaced.

Meanwhile regulators from six European countries are planning to act against Google to force the US internet giant to comply with the European Union (EU) privacy rules (See: Six European regulators to act over Google's privacy policy).