Google may not be evil, but it's also not trustworthy

It's become impossible to ignore Google's lengthening string of privacy and regulatory missteps. The company has been found by the Federal Communications Commission to have collected and kept emails and Web browsing histories, even passwords, of individuals whose Wi-Fi signals were intercepted by vehicles photographing street scenes for its Street View program. Google stands accused of lying about the practice and resisting a government investigation of the case.

The Mountain View

The Mountain View, Calif., company appears to have expressly bypassed privacy settings on the Safari browser loaded on every Apple iPad and iPhone, allowing it to secretly track the online behavior of the devices' users. That could pose an especially big problem for Google, because thus it may have breached a settlement it had reached in a previous federal complaint by agreeing not to misrepresent its privacy practices hereafter.

"Google looks at laws and getting permission as impediments to making the world a better place," Scott Cleland, an assiduous Google critic at the business consultancy Precursor, told me. Cleland labels the company's attitude "Goobris."

None of this means that you shouldn't do business with Google or utilize its programs. In many respects Google is an admirable company, and in some respects then ahead of its tech sector peers.

The best on the market

I find its Chrome Web browser to be the best on the market. Google's Android operating system for mobile devices has become a successful counterweight to Apple's iOS-driven iPhone, for which anyone wary of creeping monopolization should be grateful. The company hosts a program of lectures for its employees by authors and public figures, and posts the events online. And some of its search capabilities are stunning — just try to find patents from the U.S. patent office as easily as you can find them through Google's patent search.

As a sign that the reality of Google's expansive reach is beginning to reach the average consumer, consider the furor created by the terms of service applicable to Google Drive, a recently launched service based in the computing "cloud" that enables users to transfer or sync files among their various computers and mobile devices and those of their colleagues.

The FCC report on the Street View episode may be the best illustration why. The agency says that for three years starting in mid-2007, Google equipped its vehicles with the ability to capture data from private unencrypted Wi-Fi networks as they roamed the world taking street-level photos for its Google Maps.

During for the company to get its story straight

It took a during for the company to get its story straight. With the naked eye Google denied that it had collected any "payload" data, which could include everything from the Web addresses Wi-Fi users were accessing to the content of their email. At the time the company said the data it got were too fragmented to be intelligible. Next it admitted it at times collected whole emails, Web addresses and passwords. Initially Google said the collection was a mistake, at that time acknowledged that the capability had been written into the vehicles' software and management knew all about it. In the meantime, the FCC said, Google "specifically impeded and delayed" its investigation.

Google maintains that it gave the government everything it asked for and blames much of the delay on the FCC's own dithering. The company as well notes that the FCC, as then as other federal agencies, concluded that in collecting data from Wi-Fi networks unprotected by passwords it had not broken the law, which allows access to communications willingly available to the public, just as unprotected Wi-Fi systems.

The best that can be said about all this is that Google is undergoing evolution from a calling to a corporation. Former Google executive James Whittaker, explaining recently why he quit the company, wrote on a Microsoft blog that the Google he joined years ago was "a innovation company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus."