google

By Cecilia Kang Washington Post Staff Writer Wednesday, November 10, 2010

The Federal Communications Commission said Wednesday it is investigating whether Google violated communications laws when it collected data from WiFi networks in U.S. homes through its Street View mapping program.

The probe comes amid U.S. and international government regulators’ growing concerns that Web companies such as Google and Facebook are operating fast and loose by collecting information on Internet users without clear rules to protect consumers.

via FCC probes Google over Street View program’s collection of personal data.

Google is partnered with the NSA so I’m guessing this is gonna get ignored.

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Jesse Drucker Oct 21, 2010

Oct. 21 (Bloomberg) — Google Inc. cut its taxes by $3.1 billion in the last three years using a technique that moves most of its foreign profits through Ireland and the Netherlands to Bermuda.

Google’s income shifting — involving strategies known to lawyers as the “Double Irish” and the “Dutch Sandwich” — helped reduce its overseas tax rate to 2.4 percent, the lowest of the top five U.S. technology companies by market capitalization, according to regulatory filings in six countries.

“It’s remarkable that Google’s effective rate is that low,” said Martin A. Sullivan, a tax economist who formerly worked for the U.S. Treasury Department. “We know this company operates throughout the world mostly in high-tax countries where the average corporate rate is well over 20 percent.”

The U.S. corporate income-tax rate is 35 percent. In the U.K., Google’s second-biggest market by revenue, it’s 28 percent.

Google, the owner of the world’s most popular search engine, uses a strategy that has gained favor among such companies as Facebook Inc. and Microsoft Corp. The method takes advantage of Irish tax law to legally shuttle profits into and out of subsidiaries there, largely escaping the country’s 12.5 percent income tax. (See an interactive graphic on Google’s tax strategy here.)

via Google 2.4% Rate Shows How $60 Billion Lost to Tax Loopholes – Bloomberg.

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By Stephanie Kirchgaessner in Washington and Richard Waters in San Francisco

Published: October 27 2010 17:37 | Last updated: October 27 2010 19:09

The top US consumer protection agency has dropped an inquiry into data collection breaches by Google, even as regulators in Europe and Canada have stepped up their scrutiny of the internet giant’s privacy policies.

David Vladeck, the director of the bureau of consumer protection at the Federal Trade Commission, said the FTC had decided to drop its investigation into Google’s allegedly inadvertent collection of consumer data in 2007 because it was satisfied that Google had adequately addressed the issue internally.

The FTC decision marks the end of at least one major probe into the most damaging privacy breach to hit the company to date. But the company is still facing ongoing investigations by individual state attorneys general in the US, and regulators in Spain and Canada both last week concluded that Google had broken local laws while investigations are underway in other countries.

Google admitted for the first time last week that the cars it had used to photograph residential streets for its Street View mapping service had illicitly collected some personal e-mails and passwords from the homes it passed. The breach was first announced in May.

via FT.com / Technology – US trade commission ends Google probe.

Don’t Be Evil – Google

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