back to article Street View hauled into Spanish court

A Madrid judge has ordered Google's legal representative in Spain to appear in court in October over charges that Street View's clandestine Wi-Fi slurping operations may have breached the country's privacy laws. Judge Raquel Fernandino of the capital's Magistrates' Court number 45 acted on a complaint by the Asociación para la …

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  1. James Micallef Silver badge
    Go

    Big ups to Spain

    "Our final aim is to delete the data according to our legal obligations"

    I would have thought that Google's legal obligation in this case is to keep the data, since it's evidence. They can be ordered to delete the data once they're found guilty. The only Fail here is that probably the person responsible will get away scot-free... the result would be a fine for Google and maybe a personal prosecution for some low-level company scapegoat.

    This is really a weak point in company law that companies abuse to hell and back - they have all the advantages of being a legal person, without quite a few of the disadvantages. eg I would probably go to jail for driving around and collecting people's data. You can't send a company to jail, and even though in theory company directors can be responsible for some company actions, in practice it's always easy to say that some rogue employee(s) somewhere down the line did it all.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      can google delete it?

      A lot of legal responses to deleting data permanently, are the physical destruction of any storage hardware found to have held it.

      Certainly having it all copied onto one hard drive, and that hard drive erased in the presence of witnesses, doesn't even come close to covering it!

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Comminucations?

    Wouldn't want anyone touching mine :-)

  3. Mitch Kent
    Big Brother

    I'm curious...

    Who would actually end up being spanked if these various countries find laws broken?

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