Reading news while I have my first coffee on the day and I get to Bloomberg’s Technology site. And what are the first headlines I see?
Google Settles Privacy Case Over Street View for $13 Million
Google agreed to pay $13 million to end long-running litigation over claims that it violated a U.S. wiretapping law when vehicles used for its Street View mapping project captured data from private Wi-Fi networks.
The settlement agreement filed Friday in San Francisco federal court calls for the money to be distributed to consumer privacy groups and requires the company to destroy all the collected data, as well as to educate people how to set up encrypted wireless networks
and:
YouTube Reaches Settlement With U.S. on Children’s Privacy
Details of the agreement couldn’t be learned.
The settlement resolves a probe into whether the Google video service broke the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act, which makes it illegal to collect information on minors and disclose it to others without parental permission. A group of activists last year asked the FTC to look into the matter. The FTC declined to comment. YouTube declined to comment.
You can read more about each development on Bloomberg, but these settlements years later leave me muttering to myself about all the problems and risks privacy activists point out now that are not being addressed promptly or effectively by Congress. Maybe I should just think of them of “to be settled in 10 years?”
Gah….