The cosy relationship between Google and the Information Commission

A fascinating scoop by PC Pro magazine. Via freedom of information requests, the magazine has discovered a somewhat cosy relationship between the Information Commission and Google.

Following my Parliamentary debate and call for an inquiry into Google harvesting private wi fi and email data, and criticism of the Information Commission, it seems that senior ICO officials sent emails to google, criticising my actions.  From the emails uncovered, it seems that rather than investigating the Google breach of data, the ICO was mlore intent on dealing with the bad publicity.

PC Pro writes:

"The Information Commissioner’s Office and Google teamed up on their response to an MP's complaint about the search giant's Wi-Fi scandal, according to documents obtained by PC Pro under the Freedom of Information Act.

Google was caught scraping data from unsecured Wi-Fi connections in May, but initially said no personal information was collected.

The ICO investigated in July, agreeing with that assertion, but in October both had to admit they were wrong after other data watchdogs uncovered that email addresses, passwords and URLs had in fact been picked up.

Following that admission, Tory MP Robert Halfon, started to ask questions about the investigation in parliament. “As a country we don’t take individual rights seriously enough and the Information Commissioner’s response has been woeful," Halfon said at the time, later comparing the ICO's investigators to Keystone Cops.

We are having an internal meeting next week about our next steps and obviously in light of Rob Halfon MP’s continued misrepresentation of the issue, the quicker we get something done the better

After Google confessed the scraped data held more personal information than it first admitted, the ICO's group manager for business and industry, Dave Evans, sent an email to a Google employee with the subject line “guess what this might be about”.

Evans asked the Google employee, whose name has been redacted, if they were free for a “quick chat about the Wi-Fi business”.

“We are having an internal meeting next week about our next steps and obviously in light of Rob Halfon MP’s continued misrepresentation of the issue, the quicker we get something done the better,” Evans said.

The exchange was revealed in a Freedom of Information Act request by PC Pro. However, the ICO refused to hand over details of its Google investigation, claiming the information could hinder other data watchdogs’ on-going cases.

Consequently, all that is publicly known about the ICO’s actual investigation of the illegally scraped data is that two staff members were sent to Google’s office in July – and that has only come to light following a parliamentary question tabled by Halfon".

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As I have written before, the ICO's investigation into Google was lamentable. It did not send proper technicians to investigate the data breach.  It has not asked Google to handover the data, and for many months chose to do nothing, until there was sustained parliamentary pressure. Now we know that the ICO was in fact colluding with Google.  This strange relationship between Google and the ICO demands further investigation.

I leave the last word to the excellent Big Brother Watch:

"After Google admitted collecting personal data, the ICO declared the incident a “serious” breach of the Data Protection Act. The watchdog required Google to sign an “undertaking notice,” promising to delete the data, submit to an audit and improve its data practises.

But the documents obtained by PC Pro show that the ICO let Google submit changes to the undertaking, notably asking the watchdog to shrink down the scope of the audit:

“That draft scope was however extremely wide and one Google would definitely not be comfortable with without considerable refinement and discussion,” wrote a Google employee.

Google later explained that the company was worried about the precedent the audit might set in other countries.

The two organisations debated the timeframe, with the ICO preferring the audit happen within six months, while Google appeared to favour a year. In the end, the pair split the difference and agreed on nine months.

How chummy.

The documents also show ICO employees didn’t initially believe investigating the issue was "actual work":

“Apologies for taking a while to get back to you with yet more questions, but restructuring in the office and other (actual) work has delayed my response somewhat,” Evans wrote in May to a Google employee, two months before the watchdog looked at a sample of the collected data.

And there's no need to take my word for any of this. You can see the two collections of emails can be viewed in PDF format over at PC Pro (to whom, massive kudos for a first class bit of investigation).

For some time I have been maintaining that the ICO is an apologist for the worst offender in the field rather than a policeman of it. Well, here's the proof, in writing".

by Robert Halfon - www.roberthalfon.blogspot.com