Google's private data grab means big legal trouble

Google Inc may have won some hard legal battles in the past, but none as tough as the toxic fight brewing over its unauthorized capture of private information while taking photos for its online maps.

Not only are there investigations in Europe, Australia, Canada and Hong Kong, but the US Federal Trade Commission is looking at Google's data collection methods, lawmakers are demanding more information and more than 30 state attorneys general have launched their own probes.

The online behemoth's biggest problem is that its Street View product launched in 2007 was controversial from the start because its mobile teams drove down streets, took pictures of buildings and put them online.

But in the past, the debate about Street View was focused on discomfort with having homes posted online for anyone to see, not on Google capturing unencrypted Wi-Fi from the very same homes to determine location. No one complained because no one knew about Google collecting snippets of email and other personal data.

Google has said it also did not know it was gathering the data, but the FTC will probably question whether Google violated reasonable expectations of privacy, according to Pamela Jones Harbour, a former FTC commissioner.

"I know that when I was there, if the commission were to look at that, they would run it through the prism of the FTC Act, which prohibits unfair and deceptive practices," she said. "Did it violate consumers' reasonable expectation of privacy?"

Deception does not have to refer to what Google said about the project, but could also mean what it omitted, said Harbour, now a partner at Fulbright and Jaworski LLP.

Harbour acknowledged that Google's argument it had no intention of collecting the data could help. But she added: "Why were they developing code in the first place that was collecting that information?"