Google: oh, the indignity!

The almighty, sanctimonious search engine king left China in a huff a few months ago, unable to work under the authoritarian, Orwellian restrictions placed on its information by the Chinese authorities. Once again, a ‘shining example’ of Western ideals and progressive liberalism was on display, while the big, bad Tiananmen Sq. meanies continue to live in the dark ages with their wire taps, illegal hacking, and censorship. Awful, isn’t it? Well, everyone – press, politicians, corporations, and certainly Joe Public love a tidy demarcation line of ‘good and bad’, ‘us and them’ because to believe that there is a band of grey amongst this land of black and white is tantamount to actually having to use your, um, grey matter. Who wants to do that? Life’s so simple when it’s made simple for us.

Now, the ‘don’t be evil’ maxim pioneered by Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google has fallen by the wayside in favor of ‘just steal info for our own gain.’ How the mighty are full of s**t! It seems that Google, in its effort to launch the streetview service, has been collecting data from unsecured wi-fi’s around the world, and now Privacy International is launching a prosecution the BBC reports, will prove “criminal intent.” With the Germans most intent to prosecute, Google nevertheless, maintains this is all a mistake of one engineer. According to PI, this seems highly unlikely. “As we have said before, this was a mistake. The report today confirms that Google did indeed collect and store payload data from unencrypted wi-fi networks, but not from networks that were encrypted. We are continuing to work with the relevant authorities to respond to their questions and concerns,” said a Google spokesman. How do you just “make the mistake” of stealing unprotected data? Whoops. This sounds a bit like the Beijing Blues again – only this time, it’s that perfect, shiny modern company that has been tarnished.
I’m sure this won’t harm Google – as it was reported in the back pages of the BBC and well, everybody uses them and aren’t they ‘the good guys?’ But, isn’t it funny how much ink was spilled from journalists when the wiretapping and information theft was on the Chinese side? I love a good game of hypocrisy.