The snappily-titled Asociación para la Prevención y Estudio de Delitos, Abusos y Negligencias en Informática y Comunicaciones Avanzadas (Association for the Prevention and Investigation of Crime, Abuse and Malpractice in Information Technology and Advanced Communications), aka Apedanica, has filed suit in the Police Court of Madrid against the legal representative of Google Spain.

It suggests the company has breached Article 197 of the Penal Code, which provides for between one and fours years' jail for anyone who “intercepts telecommunications, or uses listening, transmission, recording or reproduction devices on any other communication signal”.

When it confessed back in back in May that Street View spymobiles had been “collecting information sent over open Wi-Fi networks”, Google claimed the whole thing was a “mistake”, and later blamed it on a rogue software coder.

This explanation has failed to impress. Apedanica president Miguel Angel Gallardo insisted that “something which was carefully programmed and has been done in 30 countries can´t be an error”.

On 19 May, the Spanish Data Protection Agency (Agencia Española de Protección de Datos, or AEPD) opened an investigation into the matter, and last Tuesday Google Spain´s director general, Javier Rodríguez, promised all culled data would be handed over to the agency.

Apedanica has evidently decided that´s not good enough, and its legal action adds to increasing international pressure on Google over its Orwellian black Opel black ops. ®

via The Register.

Google Inc., under investigation in Germany for the data-gathering practices of its Street View mapping service, now faces probes in Spain, France and Italy for possible violation of privacy laws.

Spain’s Data Protection Authority yesterday ordered an investigation of whether Google breached national privacy rules by collecting and storing data from Wi-Fi networks and information sent over these networks. Italy and France also ordered inquiries.

The Spanish agency “will call on Google to explain whether it has captured data without the consent of citizens in Spain,” it said in an e-mailed statement May 19. It sent a formal request urging Google “to block the data associated with wireless networks gathered in Spanish territory.”

The Hamburg Prosecutors’ Office said yesterday that it’s investigating people at Google on suspicion of criminal data capture. German data regulators are already looking into how cars that Google used to take pictures for Street View ended up with private data from Wi-Fi networks that weren’t password- protected.

Google, based in Mountain View, California, said May 17 that it deleted data mistakenly gathered from Wi-Fi networks in Ireland and was aiming to do the same in other countries.

Company representatives didn’t return calls and e-mails seeking comment yesterday on the latest investigations.

Street View allows Google users to click on maps to see photographs of roadsides. Officials from 30 European countries on May 11 adopted a common approach to keep Google from infringing privacy rights as the service is rolled out in Europe. They want Google, owner of the world’s biggest search engine, to improve blurring techniques used to disguise images and to make faces and license plates harder to recognize.

“The product as such is not in breach, but more measures have to be taken to improve how images are gathered and used,” Gerard Lommel, a Luxembourg member of the so-called Article 29 Data Protection Working Party, said May 11. The group is made up of the European Union’s 27 nations, plus Iceland, Liechtenstein and Norway.

Switzerland’s data-protection agency sued Google in November for allegedly failing to comply with proposals to make it harder to identify people and cars on Street View. That case is pending.

via Google Street View Privacy Probe Joined by Spain, Italy, France – BusinessWeek.

One of the cool things about Android is that Google is always innovating and looking to add new features/functions to the OS. Yahoo Tech reports that Google was showing off new software at Mobile World Congress in Spain this week that translates foreign text when the user takes a picture with their Android device´s camera.

At the MWC demo, a Google engineer took a picture of a German restaurant menu with an Android smartphone. The translation software takes the photo, uploads it to Google servers, and translates the text automatically. The translation is then sent back to the user.

In the demo, the image had an item with the German description “Fruhlingssalat mit Wildkrautern” which the Google software was able to accurately translate to “spring salad with wild herbs.” The difference in this Google offering and similar apps already available is that the translation is done on the Google servers.

The reason for that is to allow more processing power to be applied to the translation than the mobile device can muster on its own. The result is supposed to be faster translations. That is assuming that the mobile network in the area is fast enough to send a photo quickly to Google´s servers.

Google offered no indication of when the software would be offered for Android devices.

via DailyTech – Google Shows Off Translation Software for Android at MWC 2010.

Speaking Monday at a press conference in the northern city of Bilbao, President Cesar Alierta said companies like Google use a lot of network bandwidth for free, something which was lucky for them but not for Telefonica.

Alierta says his company, which operates in Spain and across Latin America, provides the network, product sale, customer care, installation and maintenance to search engine companies that profit from using them.

He says things had to change. Telefonica spokesman Miguel Angel Garzon told The Associated Press on Monday the ideas expressed by Alierta were not new and had been talked about by many network service providers around the world.

via Spain’s Telefonica considers charging Google – Yahoo! News.