Google would argue all laws don't apply to them. Tax laws and now data protection.
High Court derails Google defence in Safari browser stalker cookie brouhaha
The High Court in London, England, today rejected Google's claim that the company is not subject to UK data protection laws. The advertising giant – sued by Brits who allege the company invaded their privacy – tried to argue that Blighty's courts have "no jurisdiction" over it. But the High Court disagreed, and now Google will …
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Thursday 16th January 2014 15:18 GMT Ralph B
Re: Don't be evil!
Like I said, "Don't Be Evil" is a meant as a warning to us, not a motto for them.
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Thursday 16th January 2014 12:54 GMT Anonymous Coward
If Google starts to respect privacy again and participates in this country in a responsible way, our campaign will be unnecessary. Until then, our fight continues – in the English courts, in the media, in Parliament and online. Our message to Google is clear: stop abusing your users.
Just to clarify this, this is a statement made by a man who brought an Apple device? Really? A man who joined a walled garden, and willingly handed over all his personal information to Apple, has some grounds to complain about companies not respecting personal privacy?
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Thursday 16th January 2014 16:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Confused
Ok as a quick roundup
They have my..
1 email address
2 name
3 credit card details if I use the apple stores, or I purchased the device from them
4 real address ( see 3) , until I move
5 purchasing details if I use apple stores.
This is no more than amazon or ebay have, and this is a necessary requirement in these times
and are not really personal.
Personal is my medical data, my sexual orientation, my drinking/eating/smoking habits, criminal records,
financial details (outside of credit agency data) and phone number
Google could summarize far more about me if they could correlate the person to the queries, ever wondered why Google et al are so keen to get those extra details such as alternate email address and mobile or landline phone?
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Friday 17th January 2014 09:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Confused
You miss the point - you agreed to give this information or it is necessary to service your account - or both. In the Google issue seems they specifically sought to sidestep specific blocks / privacy / security settings to prevent them. It's perhaps more like you closing and locking your front door and them picking the lock to still get in - FOR THEIR PROFIT.
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Friday 17th January 2014 11:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Confused
"You miss the point - you agreed to give this information or it is necessary to service your account - or both. In the Google issue seems they specifically sought to sidestep specific blocks / privacy / security settings to prevent them. It's perhaps more like you closing and locking your front door and them picking the lock to still get in - FOR THEIR PROFIT."
You can't shout too loudly that someone else slurps the data you freely give away to others, no can you?
If you think that you can, you need to look a little more closely at what is actually happening, cause your complaint is spurious.
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Friday 17th January 2014 14:09 GMT Dan 55
Re: Confused
I didn't really miss the point. I bought the iDevice from a shop, not Apple, and Apple make it very difficult to use their iDevices without giving them a load of data. I don't know about now but at one stage you were obliged to give a credit card number on signing up even though there was no need for Apple to know it. This was when Apple had a problem with security and people with Apple IDs had things billed to their credit cards that they didn't ask for. To get them to forget it I eventually had to change to another country and change back again. I shouldn't have had to do that.
Apple is not infallable and they are a target, they don't really need my address, credit card number, phone, DOB, or other things sitting there on a server which can be hacked.
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Friday 17th January 2014 11:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Confused
"Ok as a quick roundup
They have my..
1 email address
2 name
3 credit card details if I use the apple stores, or I purchased the device from them
4 real address ( see 3) , until I move
5 purchasing details if I use apple stores.
This is no more than amazon or ebay have, and this is a necessary requirement in these times
and are not really personal.
Personal is my medical data, my sexual orientation, my drinking/eating/smoking habits, criminal records,
financial details (outside of credit agency data) and phone number
Google could summarize far more about me if they could correlate the person to the queries, ever wondered why Google et al are so keen to get those extra details such as alternate email address and mobile or landline phone?"
And every other piece of information you send using your choice of last decades tech!
This just digs a deeper hole.
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Friday 17th January 2014 14:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Confused
Re: Confused
"I am confused, what personal data do you give to Apple (or any other manufacturer for that matter) when you purchase one of their products.
Hardly surprising that you don't actually know!
Hardly surprising that you failed to understand the responses correctly, and yes I do know what goes on and where.
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Thursday 16th January 2014 14:04 GMT JimmyPage
@obnoxiousGit - you undermine your own argument
Just to clarify this, this is a statement made by a man who brought an Apple device? Really? A man who joined a walled garden, and willingly handed over all his personal information to Apple, has some grounds to complain about companies not respecting personal privacy?
Just because I willingly buy a copy of The Times, doesn't mean it's OK for Murdoch to mug me, steal £1 and force a copy into my hands.
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Thursday 16th January 2014 16:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: @obnoxiousGit - you undermine your own argument
Just because I willingly buy a copy of The Times, doesn't mean it's OK for Murdoch to mug me, steal £1 and force a copy into my hands.
Your analogy is flawed.
Try "after buying my copy of the Times, I was stood in the news agents browsing through the contents of the Daily Mail, when the newsagent demanded I pay for it", and you'll be closer to what happened here.
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Thursday 16th January 2014 22:56 GMT Not That Andrew
Re: @obnoxiousGit - you undermine your own argument
Just because I willingly buy a copy of The Times, doesn't mean it's OK for Murdoch to mug me, steal £1 and force a copy into my hands.
Perhaps a better analogy would be the Barklay brothers mugging you, stealing your wallet and leaving a copy of the Torygraph on your unconscious body after you buy the Times.
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Thursday 16th January 2014 13:08 GMT Steve Davies 3
How about
The mythical island that is located about 50 miles to the west of mountain View?
or perhaps
Planet Chocolate Factory.
Seriously, if google has a legal presence in the UK then yes the court does have jurisdiction.
so if google plc/ltd is listed in companies house then they should do the decent thing and admit their mistake.
Will they?
somehow, I doubt it.
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Thursday 16th January 2014 19:56 GMT I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects
Re: Steve Davies 3
It would appear from your comment that a firm stealing data here is exempt from all laws if they are not based here?
If they can be sued in USAmerica instead, then it wouldn't be out and out piracy on the high seas -which Britain used to patrol and quash pirates on in the good old days.
Wouldn't the US be a better place to nail them?
They would get decent legal facilities and bloody silly payouts. (US) This contrasts sharply with what would happen here. (They could get decent legal facilities and bloody silly payouts. (UK))
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Friday 17th January 2014 06:59 GMT Steve Davies 3
Re: Steve Davies 3
My comment was meant as a point against the claim that the UK has no legal jurisdicyion over Google.
That it actually irrelevant to the bodgy practices they engage in. That is a TOTALLY separate issue.
If Google had won this claim then they would not be subject to UK Health and Safety law, Employment law and a gazillion and one other laws. Frankly they were stupid to try this on. The implications were huge and the legal system would not let that through.
This ain't the USA where you can legally sue everyone and everything incluing God and a fly.
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Thursday 16th January 2014 18:59 GMT Fink-Nottle
Re: Check their tax returns!
> From the tax they pay it's obvious that they don't exist in the UK so the law can't apply to them.
Bollox. Google admitted to Parliament that it has a legal presence in the UK :
Google had earlier said that UK customers paid Google in Ireland. "No one in the UK can execute transactions," said Google's head of sales in Northern Europe, Matt Brittin. "No money changes hands," he said, despite the fact that he employed sales staff in Britain.
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Thursday 16th January 2014 13:32 GMT websey
As far as i am concerned if google dont want to be answerable to the UK Courts then google.co.uk / google.com / google.whatever should be blocked at the ISP level much like thepiratebay etc are.
You have office buildings, employ people etc in the UK you are a UK practicing entity so you are under the UK jurisdiction
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Friday 17th January 2014 10:17 GMT Badvok
Re: According to Companies House ..
And you know for certain that that was the legal entity responsible for using the cookie do you?
I suspect, but don't know for certain, that the workaround for Safari was orchestrated and implemented as part of Google's main US operations and not by Google UK. Are you still certain it is so clear cut?
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Thursday 16th January 2014 15:43 GMT Alexander Hanff 1
More info plus all court documents
You can read my summary of today's proceedings along with all the court documents on the following URL:
http://www.googlelawsuit.co.uk/high-court-creates-new-privacy-tort-as-google-lose-safari-hearing
It was actually a very significant judgment creating the first new English tort in 80 years.
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Thursday 16th January 2014 20:16 GMT I. Aproveofitspendingonspecificprojects
Re: Alexander Hanff 1
"You can read my summary of today's proceedings along with all the court documents:
http://www.googlelawsuit.co.uk/high-court-creates-new-privacy-tort-as-google-lose-safari-hearing"
When I was reading that, I was thinking this guy could be the British Groklawyer.
Then I got to the comments section:
https://twitter.com/GoogleLawsuit
<face/palm>WTF?</face/palm>
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Friday 17th January 2014 10:26 GMT Badvok
Re: More info plus all court documents
An interesting assessment. So a UK user accessing a non-UK service makes the operator of that service liable to prosecution under UK law.
I also wonder whether this judgment might also set a rather dangerous reverse precedent, i.e. that UK companies with users overseas must abide by all the applicable laws for the countries those users are accessing the services from?
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Friday 17th January 2014 11:12 GMT Alexander Hanff 1
Re: More info plus all court documents
I think you need to read the judgment more carefully. The Judge very clearly states (citing historical cases to support his view) that jurisdiction is determined based on where the activity took place. In the case of the Google Safari issue, the users viewed those adverts on devices in the UK - and the cookies were placed on devices in the UK - therefore the action which the complainants are asking permission to sue for took place in the UK - Douglas vs Hello! is the main supporting case cited in support of this argument.
To put this into context - if you went into a supermarket in Las Vegas, tripped over a bad piece of flooring and broke you knee - the injury took place in the US and you would sue in the US, not the UK.
As for UK companies abiding by applicable laws in the US, you need to follow the news more. For extradition to the US based on laws they have broken there (even if they have never set foot in the country), that is before you even consider SAFE Act in the US which has extra-jurisdictional powers written into it.
It is not unusual for courts to extend their jurisdictional reach beyond their borders - especially US courts.
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Friday 17th January 2014 14:22 GMT Badvok
Re: More info plus all court documents
"In the case of the Google Safari issue, the users viewed those adverts on devices in the UK - and the cookies were placed on devices in the UK."
Interesting interpretation that unfortunately sums up a fairly typical ignorance of the technology involved.
To put it another way: The users accessed a web site. That web site served content from Google's non-UK web servers (probably US based), Google's non-UK web servers used perfectly legal cookie semantics to store a small tag on the users device. Further accesses to Google's non-UK web servers utilised this tag to attach records in their own non-UK databases to that browser instance and then used that data to decide which ads to serve when the user next accessed them. No user data was stored in the UK, and no illegal activity was performed on the device in the UK, so where exactly did the offense occur?
Seems like a typical case where our judicial systems can't get to grips with the modern world.
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Saturday 18th January 2014 12:39 GMT Alexander Hanff 1
Re: More info plus all court documents
Mr Badvok, your interpretation is completely erroneous. The users of the devices had removed their consent for the placing of third party cookies being placed on their devices by using Safari (which block third party cookies). READ THE JUDGMENT. The cookies (lets call them what they are not a "small tag") were placed onto the end users terminal equipment (the device) which was physically located in the UK ergo the cookies were physically located in the UK also - not somewhere else in the world, the UK.
The targeted adverts were viewed on the same devices IN THE UK which is another part of the complaint - the Misuse of Private Information part of the complaint. The Claimants' private information was used to display those adverts IN THE UK, on the physical devices they were using IN THE UK - they were not displayed on some remote server where the web site was located at all, a script sent those specific ads to those specific users devices and other visitors to the same web site stored on the remote servers were most likely shown completely different ads (also sent directly to their devices in whichever country they were physically using said devices.)
So it seems the only person here who doesn't understand the technology, is you.
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Friday 17th January 2014 16:01 GMT cortland
Re: More info plus all court documents
-- It is not unusual for courts to extend their jurisdictional reach beyond their borders - especially US courts. --
One very large problem with extraterritoriality (sorry, didn't invent the word) is that if we were to follow that to its logical conclusion, online services accessible from abroad would have to obey all foreign laws, including those restricting what one can see or discuss.
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Friday 17th January 2014 01:16 GMT tom dial
Re: In a fair world people would be *pay* you for that data. In our world they simply take it.
If you don't want to share "your" data, you don't have to. The problem claimed here seems to be that Google copied data that the user, via the browser settings, wished not to share.
I wonder whether the plaintiffs actually can prove that their settings were as they claim, assuming that the truth has something to do with it.
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Friday 17th January 2014 11:03 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: In a fair world people would be *pay* you for that data. In our world they simply take it.
"And let's be clear about this.
It's our f**king data, not Apples, Googles, Microsofts or any other sh**bags."
You were assimilated when you purchased the oh-so-tired shiny shiny. You will do as they *tell* you!
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Friday 17th January 2014 10:24 GMT lglethal
Disconnect much?
Google: "A case almost identical to this one was dismissed in its entirety three months ago in the US."
Fact: An investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission in August of that year led to a measly $22.5m fine being dished out to Google for its privacy slip-up.
On 19 November last year, the Wisconsin Attorney General ordered Google to cough an additional $17m to be shared out among 37 states and the District of Columbia.
I wasnt aware that the Jobsian Distortion field had shifted to Google?
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Friday 17th January 2014 11:02 GMT Anonymous Coward
"Mountain View, which has staff and offices in the UK, has been battling a lawsuit brought last year by Blighty-based Apple users, whose browser habits were slurped – without permission – by Google"
Funny, they play in the munchkin playground with the rest of the fairies overseen by their mother, passing every minute detail of their lives back to Apple, and share it on Fakebook. Someone else slurps the data and their up in arms? Bit hypocritical isn't it?
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Friday 17th January 2014 11:51 GMT Stratman
"Funny, they play in the munchkin playground with the rest of the fairies overseen by their mother, passing every minute detail of their lives back to Apple, and share it on Fakebook. Someone else slurps the data and their up in arms? Bit hypocritical isn't it?"
Not at all.
Let's assume you're a man and have a wife. Because she agrees to have sex with you, does that make it OK for anyone else to have sex with her without her consent?
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Wednesday 22nd January 2014 23:09 GMT Someone Else
What a pile of specious bullshit
Google sayeth (with all the righteous indignation it can muster with a straight face):
A case almost identical to this one was dismissed in its entirety three months ago in the US.
OK, so I'm 'Murican, and I don't know all the fine subtleties of the Crown's law, but what possible difference could it make to a British court that the bought-and-sold American so-called Justice SystemTM ruled one way or another? Last time I looked, the UK is it's own sovereign country, not a suburb of Baltimore.