The Senate Privacy Subcommittee should grant immunity to the unidentified Google...
The Senate Privacy Subcommittee should grant immunity to the unidentified Google engineer at the core of the company’s so-called “Wi-Spy” scandal involving the collection of unencrypted communications by its Street View cars, a group told Subcommittee Chairman Al Franken, D-Minn.…
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Immunity for testimony from “Engineer Doe” would be “a small price to pay so the American people can finally understand what actually transpired,” John Simpson, Consumer Watchdog privacy project director, said in the letter to Franken Monday (http://xrl.us/bm5s54). The engineer has invoked his Fifth Amendment right to silence in the matter and Google has not identified him. Simpson also said the subcommittee should subpoena Google CEO Larry Page and “ask him to explain the corporate culture that allowed Wi-Spy to happen.” On Saturday Google released a largely unredacted version of the FCC’s report into the Street View matter (http://xrl.us/bm5s6k), which revealed that contrary to the company’s earlier characterization of the “payload data” collection as an accident, several other engineers were privy to Doe’s project, including one who reviewed its code “line by line” and a senior manager who knew about the payload data collection. The FCC report “shows a troubling portrait of a company where an engineer could run wild with software code that violates the privacy of tens of millions of people worldwide, but the corporate culture of ‘Engineers First’ prevented corporate counsel or other engineers from stopping the privacy violations,” Simpson told Franken. A Google spokeswoman told us the company made the report available in unredacted form, “except for the names of individuals,” because: “While we disagree with some of the statements made in the document, we agree with the FCC’s conclusion that we did not break the law. We hope that we can now put this matter behind us."