Google to let Wi-Fi routers opt out of registry

Google defused a confrontation with European privacy regulators by announcing on Tuesday it would give the owners of Wi-Fi routers worldwide the option of removing their devices from a registry Google uses to locate cellphone users.

The change was made less than four months after European regulators warned the unauthorised use of data sent by Wi-Fi routers violated European law. Google and other companies use the signals from Wi-Fi routers as navigational beacons, helping them pinpoint the locations of nearby cellphone users.

Google’s concession, while motivated by strict European privacy laws, would have an effect beyond the Continent, since Google plans to offer the option worldwide, including the United States.

In a blog post, Peter Fleischer, the Google global privacy counsel, said the Wi-Fi signals which the company used did not identify people.

“At the request of several European data protection authorities, we are building an opt-out service that would allow an access point owner to opt out from Google’s location services,” Fleischer wrote. “Once opted out, our services will not use that access point to determine users’ locations.” He said Google intended to introduce the opt-out system this fall.

The mobile business, especially in Europe, is becoming increasingly important to Google, which earns most of its money through advertising, as computing shifts to smartphones and tablet computers from desktop PCs.

Google makes the Android mobile operating system, the foremost in the world in the second quarter, with a 48 per cent share of new cellphone shipments, according to Canalys, a research company in England. Last month, Google said it would buy Motorola’s mobile phone business for $12.5 billion.

Recently, Google took a more conciliatory approach in European countries like Germany and France, which had expressed strong objections to its data collection methods.

In Germany, Google had, last year, given consumers the option of excluding photos of their properties, apartments and businesses from its StreetView online map service before it went live last fall.

The controversy over Wi-Fi data collection flared again this year when officials in Germany and France began investigating Apple, the maker of the iPhone, after researchers uncovered files on the popular smartphone that routinely logged the location of users. Those locations were calculated in part using the location of Wi-Fi routers nearby.

In May, the privacy advisory panel to the European Commission said the unauthorised collection of the location data of individual cellphone users violated Europe’s privacy law, which forbids the commercial use of private data without the owner’s consent in advance.

Apple, which attributed the iPhone’s collection of geographic data to a software error, stopped the automatic collection of Wi-Fi data about iPhone users by fixing the software. The French privacy regulator, CNIL, and privacy officials in Bavaria, the southern German state leading the investigation in Germany, dropped their investigations.

If many owners of Wi-Fi access points decided to opt out of Google’s database, it could make it harder for users of Android phones to get a fix on their locations, and thus limit Google’s ability to sell location-based advertising. But the phones can also determine their location using cell towers and satellites.

©2011 The New York Times News Service