14 DAY TRIAL // Google has missed the deadline imposed by Germany’s data protection regulators to hand over the personal data it gathered with its Street View cars. The company says that it can’t release the data as it would be in violation with German laws on the issue. Yet the Hamburg data protection supervisor, Johannes Caspar, who has been leading a crusade against the company lately, says that is not the case and handing over the data would not constitute a criminal act under German law.
“As granting access to payload data creates legal challenges in Germany which we need to review, we are continuing to discuss the appropriate legal and logistical process for making the data available,” Peter Barron, a Google spokesman in London, told the New York Times. “We hope, given more time, to be able to resolve this difficult issue.”
Google implies that the German law would prevent it from just passing over the personal data it has, by its own account, inadvertently collected. That would be the very same law it broke by collecting the data in the first place. Google didn’t elaborate on what the legal challenges were or how it plans to handle the matter.
Caspar, who gave Google until today to transfer the data to his agency for further inspection, is not satisfied with the answer. He claims that he has gotten assurances from justice officials in the country that Google would not be breaking the law by complying with the request. He says the search giant has “no apparent reason to still withhold the data.” He also confirms that criminal investigations are underway in Germany.
Of course, other countries have asked Google for the same data and the company is yet to comply with any of the requests. It has not commented on that aspect. Officials in several countries, including the US, are preparing for an investigation into the matter.
No one outside of Google has seen the data collected leading to speculation that the company may be trying to hide something and that there may be more data than the fragments it alleges to have retrieved from open wireless networks. Until a third party can verify this, there’s no way to be sure, which makes Google’s refusal to release the data even more suspect. The search giant has always enjoyed a very good public image and its motto ‘Don’t be evil’ has stood up to scrutiny so far.