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ICO in hot water over Google

by on22 July 2013

Let off the hook


The UK’s privacy watchdog is in trouble for letting Google off the hook over illegally collected Street View data. TechWeek has found flaws in Information Commissioner’s Office the investigation of Google’s siphoning of people’s data during its Street View rounds.

In June, the ICO said Google had avoided a fine as the punishment would have been “far worse” if the payload data had not been “contained”. But the ICO did not bother to check whether the data was contained at all. It just accepted that Google it had secured the relevant data in “quarantined cages”.

“No ICO member or contractor has seen the ‘quarantined cages’, or tested these for security,” the privacy body said in its FOI response.

The ICO checked what payload data was resident on the disks, the ICO was unclear about what kinds of information was eventually found. No personal data “in an intelligible form” was found within extracted HTTP or email traffic, but then noted “data collected was not limited to web browsing or email traffic.”

More here.

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