Google admitted to violating the privacy of millions (again) this week. The search giant agreed to pay $7 million and to follow a handful of new procedures in order to settle a case brought forth by 38 states related to Google's ubiquitous Street View cars.The settlement inevitably does less to punish Google — $7 million is nothing to a company with a market cap of more than $270 billion — than it does to remind the world of what's to come. If you thought Google Street View was invasive, just wait for Google Face View or whatever disconcerting term people come up with to describe the inevitable privacy violations that Google Glass will usher in.The case is unsettling. In addition to snapping pictures of basically every address in the country, Google Street View teams also scooped up countless passwords, email addresses, medical and financial records and other personal data from unencrypted wireless networks as the cars meandered down the street.On the positive end of things, the realization that Google was tapping into unprotected WiFi networks will force the company to teach people how to beef up security of their home networks. On the negative end, Google collected loads of unsuspecting Americans' personal data without permission or even warning. Google also "willfully" did not comply with a Federal Communications Commission (FCC) investigation into the matter, resulting in a $25,000 fine.The Google Street View debacle is just another entry on a long list of the company's privacy violations, but it's also . Google's biggest privacy boondoggle culminated last summer when the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) imposed a $22.5 million fine, its largest ever, on Google for serving ads specifically to people using the Safari browser. Google won 20 years of audits from the FTC the year before that for various infractions related to the short-lived Google Buzz service. And who could forget the collective outrage over changes in Google's privacy policy that suggested the company would be collecting even more user data. Now this.So is Google basically doing the opposite of its "don't be evil" mantra? Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say that Google's just another technology company looking at a wall of government regulation and asking for a few open doors. Without room to experiment and try new things, Google might say, how are they supposed to innovate?This is a tired old argument that massive technology companies have been using since the 1990s, at least, and doesn't do much to put people at ease, when it comes to things like privacy. Meanwhile, the government appears to be taking the one-thing-at-a-time approach and cracking down on specific problems when they pop up.Google Glass is bound to usher in the company's next batch of regulatory headaches. Weird as it looks and infuriating as its marketing campaign may be, Google Glass is a gamechanging bundle of technology. Not only does it usher in the era of both wearable computing and augmented reality at once, but it's also going to give developers a new blank slate for software.Privacy advocates let their minds wander to dark places at moments like this. And that's not necessarily a bad thing. It's also not necessarily productive. With Google Glass, it sounds like they're wondering how long it'll be before somebody builds an app that can record everything you see and hear using Glass. Heck, it might even be built-in to Glass. Based on previews we've seen, it only takes the jerk of a neck and the phrase "Glass, make a video" to start surveilling. With the world of web cam slaves and keystroke logging on the rise, just imagine what a hacker could do if he broke into your Glass headset and started watching everything you're doing.There's no telling how the FCC, the FTC or even Congress will react to this scenario, when it presents itself. It's fairly safe to say that they're not going to stonewall anything, so long as it's basically legal. We'll just have to sit back and wait for something to wrong with Google Glass, like it did with Street View. Google will get another slap on the wrist, probably cough up some more do and continue to disrupt.Meanwhile, you might want to double check your WiFi password. And if you see anybody walking around with a headset that looks like this, just run. The government can't protect you now.
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