Google faces WHOPPING FTC fine for Safari privacy gaffe
Millions of juiced Apple surfers could add up to huge blow
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Google is reportedly going to be slapped with a bigger regulatory fine than the meagre one handed down to it from the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) late last week.
According to Mercury News, which cites anonymous sources familiar with the confabs between the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and Google, the search giant is expected to be hit with a larger penalty over its bypassing of the default privacy settings of Apple's Safari browser.
The FTC – which is the Stateside consumer watchdog – could issue that fine within the next 30 days, the newspaper reported.
Its chums over at US communications regulator, the FCC, fined Google $25,000 last week for failing to aid its investigation into the company's "accidental" Street View fleet's Wi-Fi payload data slurp-fest.
But, significantly, the same probe failed to find that Google's actions had been unlawful because the data it collected was not encrypted.
As heavily documented in these pages, Google has been undergoing intense scrutiny of its business practices on both sides of the Atlantic for some time now.
In March, the Wall Street Journal reported that the FTC had widened its investigation of the firm to include its bypass of privacy settings on Apple's Safari browser.
Today's Mercury News piece reasserted other reports that the FTC is investigating the Safari snafu in relation to its existing consent decree. If that has been violated, then the commission could swiftly enforce that order by slapping a hefty fine on the Chocolate Factory.
Following Google's Buzz blunder in 2010, the company agreed last year to undergo biennial privacy audits for the next 20 years. As part of that agreement, Google avoided being fined and did not have to admit that its biz practices had been unlawful.
In fact, such a fine from the FTC could be huge, adding up to as much as $16,000 per violation per day.
The watchdog is currently trying to determine exactly how many people were affected by the Safari breach. That number of iPad, iPhone and Mac users could run into millions, the newspaper said. ®
COMMENTS
It's still further than our lot got in prosecuting them. It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure that the Computer Misuse Act 2000 makes their little wi-fi slurp completely illegal, and on the scale they did it, someone should get put away. Nnnnope, never gonna happen.
But then again, it didn't with Phorm either, did it?
Tracking a browser is actually dead easy.
It's possible to fingerprint a browser several times over. Take a look at http://panopticlick.eff.org/ - a website can detect the fonts you have installed, plugins, screen size - the list goes on. Even without Javascript enabled, things like the browser user agent and your IP may fingerprint you. See http://browserspy.dk as well - lots of ways to fingerprint browsers.
Regardless of if you browse in "private mode" or not, regardless of what browser you use, you are *easy* to track. And that's without ever touching Flash or Java, too.
They did it to IE users at around the same time
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2012/02/20/google-bypassing-user-privacy-settings.aspx
I'd say deliberate and malicious. One browser might be a mistake. Two starts looking like company policy. It's well known that Google places little value on privacy
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