Germany’s Complicated Relationship With Google Street View

Germany is one of the most privacy-sensitive countries in the world. So when Google started taking pictures of buildings and homes for its Street View maps, some people were outraged, even though it was legal. Then, when Johannes Caspar, the data protection supervisor in Hamburg, Germany, discovered that Google was also illegally collecting personal online data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks, the outrage overflowed. Caspar’s discovery, and his prodding of Google to turn over more information about what it was collecting, led to investigations in at least a dozen countries.

Despite Caspar’s persistence in trying to find out what Google was doing — and his dismay at discovering it was collecting private information — when his agency concluded its investigation, it fined Google $189,225, the amount of money Google made every two minutes last year. Mr. Caspar called on lawmakers to raise the amount that regulators could fine companies. Yet even he did not fine Google the maximum amount that he could have, which would have been $195,000. Why? Caspar said he had given Google the discount because the company gave him a copy of the German data it had collected and, he said, finally cooperated at the end of the investigation.