Back More
Salem Press

Table of Contents

Privacy Rights in the Digital Age

Google

by Katharina Hering

A corporation founded in 1998 that dominates the Internet with its products and services. Google remains the most widely used search engine around the globe, and many of the company's communication and publishing tools and services continue to be among the market leaders, including its email service Gmail, video-sharing service YouTube, blogging platform Blogger, social media network Google+, and file-sharing service Google Drive. As Google—which set out to “organize the world's information and make it universally accessible”—rose to become one of the world's most powerful technology companies, concerns about the company's protection of privacy also began to rise. While Google's web crawlers have been caching and indexing billions of web pages, the company has also been storing vast amounts of personal information on its servers. In 2007, the watchdog organization Privacy International rated Google as “hostile” to privacy in a report that ranked Internet companies by how they handle the protection of personal data.

In 2004, in response to the launch of Gmail, thirty-one privacy and civil liberties organizations wrote a letter to Google's cofounders urging them to suspend the Gmail service until the company clarified its privacy protection policies and made its practices more transparent. The signers were concerned about Google's plan to scan the text of all incoming messages so that companies could place targeted ads based on keywords. In addition, they warned about the risks of misuse posed by the unlimited period for data retention. In 2004, the Online Privacy Protection Act, Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code §§ 22575–22579 (2004), became effective in California. The initial bill prohibited the provider of electronic mail to scan email without the consent of all parties. Google, however, had initiated a public relations and lobbying campaign against the proposed bill and was ultimately successful in convincing lawmakers to remove the major consent provisions. Gmail was implemented as planned.

Google Street View, introduced in 2007 as a feature of Google maps, has been particularly controversial. Street View allows users to view panoramic photographic images of locations and to zoom in and out on specific locations. Google has been collecting these images by dispatching a fleet of assorted vehicles equipped with specialized surveillance cameras to the areas that have been mapped. After being uploaded to the Internet, the photos are merged to create seamless panoramic views. Street View, initially introduced in a few U.S. cities, was quickly expanded and is now available for locations around the globe. The controversies surrounding Street View also highlight the challenges of confronting Google's data-collecting practices while establishing and affirming international safeguards for the protection of privacy.

Lauren H. Rakower, an expert in technology law, has argued that Street View violates the international right to privacy as stated by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Several European countries, as well as Australia, temporarily banned the implementation of Street View, and citizens in several countries formed grassroots campaigns against dispatching Google's Street View fleet in their neighborhoods. Protests increased after a European data protection agency discovered that Google has been collecting vast amounts of Wi-Fi data in addition to collecting images for Street View. In response, privacy advocates called for a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigation into whether Google's practices violated the federal Wiretap Act.

Subsequently, more than twelve countries investigated Google's practices, and the company was ultimately charged with violating privacy laws in at least nine countries. In the class action suit Joffe v. Google, Inc., 729 F.3d 1262 (9th Cir. 2013), Google was sued for intercepting private communications from millions of users on unencrypted networks. The U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the ruling that intercepting unencrypted Wi-Fi broadcasts violates the Wiretap Act. Google attempted to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court declined to hear the case, however, affirming the lower court's decision. The company reached a $7 million settlement with the attorneys general of thirty-eight states and the District of Columbia over the Street View collection from unprotected Wi-Fi networks.

Defending its practices, Google claimed that it collected the data by accident, yet it also admitted that it did not adequately protect the privacy of consumers. While Google stopped collecting Wi-Fi data through its Street View fleet, concerns about the company's data collection practices have not been alleviated. Indeed, the privacy issues are closely linked to the very nature of Google's operation and mission: The company “makes money because it harvests, copies, aggregates, and ranks billions of Web contributions by millions of authors,” according to Siva Vaidhyanathan. Google collects information when users use its services; it copies and disseminates information about people that has been published on the Internet; and it continues to collect images for Street View, potentially exposing private views to the public. While Google has made it easier to control one's privacy settings by introducing a central portal under the “my account” settings, controlling the information that the company retains about individual users remains daunting. Google's privacy policies frequently change as the company evolves and develops new features such as Google Glass, opening up new privacy concerns.

Significant recent challenges to Google's data collection and retention practices have come from European courts and policymakers. In Google Spain v. AEPD, (May 13, 2014) (Case C-131/12), the European Court of Justice ruled that European citizens have a right to request that commercial search firms, such as Google, that gather personal information for profit should remove links to private information when asked, provided the information is no longer relevant. The decision affirmed the “right to be forgotten,” which has been developed and implemented in the European Union (EU) and Argentina for the past decade. Subsequently, Google has had to respond to tens of thousands of requests to remove personal information from its index.

Privacy advocates have been calling for establishment of the right to be unlinked in the United States as well. The movement to establish international regulations to safeguard the protection of privacy by Google and other companies that collect vast amounts of user data continues to gain ground.

Further Reading

1 

Bennett, Colin J. The Privacy Advocates: Resisting the Spread of Surveillance. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008.

2 

Electronic Privacy Information Center. Ben Joffe v. Google, Inc. https://epic.org/amicus/google-street-view/.

3 

Rakower, Lauren. “Blurred Line: Zooming in on Google Street View and the Global Right to Privacy.” Brooklyn Journal of International Law 37, no. 1 (2011): 317–347.

4 

Sarpu, Bridget A. “Google: The Endemic Threat to Privacy.” Journal of High Technology Law 15, no. 1 (2014): 97–134.

5 

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.

6 

“31 Privacy and Civil Liberties Organizations Urge Google to Suspend Gmail.” Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, posted April 6, 2004. https://www.privacyrights.org/ar/GmailLetter.htm.

See also: Data protection regimes; Email; Federal Communications Commission (FCC); Right to Be Forgotten; Wearable technology

Citation Types

MLA 9th
Hering, Katharina. "Google." Privacy Rights in the Digital Age, edited by Christopher T. Anglim & JD, Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=PRDA_0102.
APA 7th
Hering, K. (2016). Google. In C. Anglim & JD (Ed.), Privacy Rights in the Digital Age. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.
CMOS 17th
Hering, Katharina. "Google." Edited by Christopher T. Anglim & JD. Privacy Rights in the Digital Age. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2016. Accessed May 30, 2026. online.salempress.com.