Google Hastens to Show Its Concern for Privacy

Google has repeatedly redefined how people communicate and acquire knowledge in the 21st century, and it has repeatedly been accused of breaking the rules in the process. The company says it has taken its mistakes in the Street View case to heart and has already changed.

Never again, it says, will a midlevel engineer be able to do anything like what one did in Street View: start a program to scoop up data secretly from potentially millions of unencrypted Wi-Fi networks around the world, without his bosses bothering to know. To make sure of this, a coalition of 38 states has drawn up numerous specific steps for Google to take, ranging from educating its engineers to educating its lawyers. Whatever Google was doing before to improve its privacy controls was not enough, the states say. Google’s internal compliance will not be directly monitored. But if states feel Google is not upholding its side of the deal, they can bring the matter up to the executive committee that brokered the deal, including the attorneys general of Illinois, Massachusetts and Texas. Some privacy experts think the program has a fair chance of success.