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Well-Intentioned Employees Can Make Poor Judgment Calls

May 8, 2012

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In 2007, Google’s Street View project began to collect “payload data” including e-mail addresses, text messages, and passwords from unsecured Wi-Fi networks of potentially hundreds of millions of people. More than a dozen countries began investigations of Street View in 2010 and in the United States, the Justice Department, the Federal Trade Commission, state attorney generals and the F.C.C. began looking into the matter. On April 13, 2012 The Federal Communications Commission released a report on Google’s Street View project after a 17-month investigation. The initial viewpoint was the data collection was a result of a “rogue” engineer operating on his own. That however, has been revealed to be false. According to the report, the engineer suggested it was entirely intentional: “We are logging user traffic along with sufficient data to precisely triangulate their position at a given time, along with information about what they were doing.” Google responded in a blog saying, “The project leaders did not want, and had no intentions of using, payload data.” In addition, Google stressed that the engineer started the project on his “20 percent” time – time that Google gives to employees to work on their own initiatives. So how did this happen? A Google executive says, “Quite simply, it was a mistake.” Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center says, “This is what happens in the absence of enforcement and the absence of regulation.” Sometimes well-intentioned employees make poor judgment calls, putting their company in a compromising situation. Proper regulations, especially when employees are empowered to work on their own initiatives, can prevent media frenzy, or as in this particular case, an investigation for potentially breaking privacy laws.

Scott Lang

Sr. Director, Product Marketing at BeyondTrust

Scott Lang has nearly 20 years of experience in technology product marketing, currently guiding the product marketing strategy for BeyondTrust’s privileged account management solutions and vulnerability management solutions. Prior to joining BeyondTrust, Scott was director of security solution marketing at Dell, formerly Quest Software, where he was responsible for global security campaigns, product marketing for identity and access management and Windows server management.

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