It still puzzles me that people feel like their <i>legal</i> privacy was violated by the info gathering. The wifi was broadcasting, they were in public, they recorded some data. If this is illegal, I don't think it should be. Its analagous to taking pictures of people in public. Its in public. They're just standing there with an antenna.<p>Granted, it seems a bit creepy, and I don't fault people for feeling violated. But legal action seems silly. (I know that laws may be different in these various countries - I'm saying that this _shouldn't_ be illegal if it is)
So I imagine a bunch of police rush into a google office… what exactly do they do? Do they jump on someone's desktop and start searching for evidence? Do they say "nobody touch nothin' ya hear?" and take over as sysadmin?<p>I mean they seized hard drives… Do they think that the data is on the hard drives laying around in the office?<p>This never makes sense to me.
Hilarious timing by Yonhap (S. Korea's public news agency) --- they reported this morning, just as the raid was about to begin: "Google ranked #1 as foreign company people want to work for" (in Korean):
<a href="http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/economy/2010/08/10/0302000000AKR20100810050700003.HTML" rel="nofollow">http://www.yonhapnews.co.kr/economy/2010/08/10/0302000000AKR...</a><p>"According to the results of job portal JobsKorea's research on 814 university students on August 10, the foreign-invested company most desired to work for was Google, in first place with 23.1% of respondents. Afterwards were 9.0% for Yuhan Kimberly (a Kimberly-Clark JV), 5.3% for Citibank, 4.8% for IBM, and 3.2% for Sony."<p>As for this incident ... well, Internet privacy in Korea was always a crapshoot anyway, seeing as you have to send your citizen's id and real name to sign up for social networking sites, random forums, online shopping and games, or to verify your age so you can search for "breast cancer" or "genital warts" on Naver.<p>Not to minimise the very real concerns over what the hell Google is doing, but this raid smells of some ambitious young public prosecutors who want to make a name for themselves by taking on a big foreign company (and ignoring all the domestic companies whom I highly doubt have been entirely on the up-and-up about what they do with their 100% personally identifiable data about the members of their own sites). Incidentally, remember that last year, Google explicitly chose to disable Youtube comments and uploads from Korea rather than comply with the real name registration requirements ...
<a href="http://www.pcworld.com/article/162989/google_disables_uploads_comments_on_youtube_korea.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcworld.com/article/162989/google_disables_upload...</a>
Google is facing the same accusations in Germany (they've been cleared in the UK) and in other countries, I think the raid may have to do with them stonewalling investigators like they did in Germany. After all, the Korean police can read the news just fine and they must have tried to get a feeling for how google would respond if they asked.<p>The not-so-smart element here is that I presume google learned a lot from their previous encounters with the law in Italy, France, the UK and Germany and would not have left any relevant data lying around their offices for investigators to find.<p>What bothers me about googles' behaviour in all this is that they behave as though they're above the law in terms of privacy and on top of that they had no business collecting this information in the first place.<p>Saying you're going to photograph the streets but actually adding a wardriving module to your data collection vehicles is not something that you can claim you did 'accidentally'.<p><a href="http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0515/google-streetview-vans-accidentally-spied-private-wifi-data/" rel="nofollow">http://rawstory.com/rs/2010/0515/google-streetview-vans-acci...</a><p>I find that extremely hard to believe and I think google has some public explaining to do about how such a thing could ever happen 'by accident'.
This sounds like a me too by the korean police. I mean, what's the point, most of that data won't be held on korean servers, much less google's korean office.<p>I'd like to know if google employees even use their desktop as thick or thin clients.