European courts brought more bad news to Google’s recent reign of error as Switzerland’s top Court ruled that Google’s Street View mapping service violated the privacy of its citizens forcing Google to blur faces and license plate numbers before putting images on the Internet. The Swiss Court stated, “the interest of the public in having a visual record and the commercial interests of the defendants in no way outweighs the rights over one’s own image.” Switzerland joins the United Kingdom, Spain and France all of whom have found that Google violated various privacy laws.

Lately, the United States has gotten into the act.  Last year, the Federal Communications Commission opened an investigation after the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) filed a complaint asking the Commission to investigate violations of federal wiretap law and the U.S. Communications Act. Now, the FTC has launched an anti-trust probe into Google and the Senate will be holding hearings on privacy and Google’s anti-competitiveness nature when Congress returns in September.  But authorities have only begun to scratch the surface of issues relating to whether Google has lived up to its mantra of “Do No Evil.”

One thing is clear–Google’s position on privacy turns America’s long-standing view of the Constitution on its head.

In December 2009, Google’s CEO, Eric Schmidt, declared about privacy concerns: “If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines—including Google—do retain this information for some time and it’s important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.”

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Google has built an empire by collecting, storing and using the personal data of their users. Every email sent through Gmail; every document created with GoogleDocs; every purchase made with Google Wallet; every thing users do is stored on Google’s servers and used for whatever marketing purpose the company sees fit.

The model goes something like this: offer a “free” product and then just sit back and collect all the valuable data users turn over.  Next, store this data forever and finally use the aggregate and historical data to develop behavioral and preference models to sell to advertisers.

But the cache of data that Google has amassed is apparently not enough.  Now the company is seeking to get its hands on personal data from non-Google users and they want their current users to help to get it.  Some might call it crowd sourcing a data heist.

Google’s new product, Google +, is their effort to enter the social media space. Incredibly, they have built a tool to import all the personal information obtained from users’ Facebook accounts onto Google servers—where it will remain forever and be used just as Google uses other data streams.  Not just users’ own private information, rather all of the information on their Facebook accounts including names, addresses, phones numbers, interests, birthdays and websites of their friends.

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From The Wall Street Journal:

U.S. government lawyers in December argued that Google hadn’t received an important security clearance for a suite of online applications despite the company’s statements to the contrary, according to a court filing unsealed last week.

But it’s unclear whether that assertion–which was pointed out by Microsoft, and which Google disputes–will have much impact on the companies’ continuing tussle over government customers.

Google has been trying to displace Microsoft in government agencies that have long used that company’s Office applications. It’s scored some wins; in December, for example, the General Services Administration–better known as GSA–awarded a $6.7 million contract to Unisys as part of a deal that will provide the agency’s more than 15,000 employees with Google’s Gmail, word processing and other services over five years.

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As we reported a few weeks ago, White House Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin became ensnared in the Google Buzz privacy controversy when his Gmail contacts were made publicly available through his Buzz profile, which included 28 senior Google lobbyists and lawyers.

The controversy has prompted a slew of letters and FOIA requests to the White House and Department of Justice from watchdog groups.  Last week, Congressman Darrell Issa sent a letter to McLaughlin asking whether the deputy CTO may have been using Gmail to communicate with his former employer, thus circumventing the laws associated with openness and transparency.  Issa gave McLaughlin a deadline of this week to answer a series of questions on what the Deputy CTO is doing to comply with official recordkeeping rules.

Now we’ve learned that another ex-Googler working in the Administration, Katie Jacobs Stanton, has been snagged by Google’s lax privacy settings as well. Like McLaughlin, Stanton — the New Media Director at the State Department — had 17 Google employees in her Gmail account exposed in the Buzz privacy flap, as the screenshots below indicate:

Katie Jacobs Stanton was President Obama’s appointee to the newly created position of Director of Citizen Participation in March of 2009 and recently moved to the State Department as the New Media Director.  Her previous responsibilities at Google included Google Moderator, Google Finance and Google’s Open Social initiative.

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Last week, we reported that Obama administration Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin –who headed up Google’s lobbying shop before joining the administration – had been ensnared in the Google Buzz privacy imbroglio when his Gmail contacts were made publicly available through his Google Buzz profile…and they revealed that McLaughlin’s most emailed Gmail contacts included more than two-dozen Google employees, including many of the company’s most senior lobbyists and lawyers.

Now, Consumer Watchdog has filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the White House to obtain all e-mails and Buzz correspondence between Deputy CTO Andrew McLaughlin and his former employer, Google.

McLaughlin’s Google Buzz account also included correspondence directly to the Google Buzz development team soon after the launch of the service inquiring about how he could communicate privately with his Gmail contacts on Buzz.  In one enlightening post, McLaughlin inquired:

“How do I delete or block followers?  There are a bunch of random people showing up whom I don’t know, and who I don’t want to read my Buzz items.”

As we pointed out, none of this suggests impropriety on the part of McLaughlin per se.  It’s not necessarily unreasonable for McLaughlin to be communicating with his former friends and colleagues at Google, although it does seem odd that McLaughlin (a senior White House official) made repeated inquiries of the Google Buzz development team about how he could communicate with his Gmail contacts, many of whom are Google lobbyists and lawyers, privately over Buzz.

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It’s been several weeks now since the disastrous rollout of Google Buzz’s initial social networking platform.  It was on February 9^ththat Google Buzz unleashed its newest foray into social media to compete with the likes of Facebook and Twitter.

According to a post on Google’s Official Blog at the time, Buzz was touted as a service that was built “right into Gmail, so you don’t have to peck out an entirely new set of friends from scratch… Buzz brings this network to the surface by automatically setting you up to follow the people you email with and chat with the most.”

And therein lies the problem…  Almost immediately, Buzz was lambasted for taking huge liberties with Gmail users’ privacy.  By default, the Gmail contacts of each new Buzz user were made publicly available in their Google profiles for the world to see.  The Buzz-o-sphere even included “follow” links, which meant that any prying snoop could harvest the contact lists of other Buzz users as well.

Well, now we’ve learned that one of those who apparently got swept up in the Buzz privacy imbroglio was none other than Andrew McLaughlin, the controversial Deputy Chief Technology Officer in the Obama White House who was formerly Google’s top lobbyist.

McLaughlin works in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and is in charge of all Internet policy for the Administration.  The two key components of OSTP’s mission are the creation of an “Open and Transparent Democracy”, and ironically, “Safeguarding the Privacy of Every American” by … “holding businesses accountable for violations of personal privacy.”  (More on this in a moment.)

McLaughlin’s Buzz profile (which he quickly made private after his contacts were exposed) is enlightening to say the least.  It includes a treasure trove of movers and shakers in high-tech, Internet public policy, and venture capital circles.

But it includes much, much more.  At least 28 of the folks Google Buzz pulled from McLaughlin’s Gmail contact list are employed by…Google!  And, as you can see from the screenshots below (captured before he made his contact lists private) McLaughlin’s Gmail appears to include a “who’s who” of Google senior lobbyists and lawyers from across the globe:

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