9to5Google: Beyond Good and Evil

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Globes.co.il is again reporting that Waze the crowd-sourced Israeli mapping company is being acquired. The rumored suitor this time around is Google and they are prepared to spend $1.3B for the mapping software. The deal could close as early as Tuesday. Bloomberg also thinks this deal is happening but puts a slightly lower $1.1B price tag on the deal.

Unless this is a defensive move, the purchase doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Google already has one of, if not the best Maps DB out there and there would be a lot of overlap with Waze’s Data.

Also, Waze appears to use the media to help with negotiations (see previous ‘leaks’) – perhaps a Facebook, Apple or Microsoft deal is going down. We’ll see, we’ll see.  Read more

You don’t get any more tenacious denials than this.

First, we have not joined any program that would give the U.S. government—or any other government—direct access to our servers. Indeed, the U.S. government does not have direct access or a “back door” to the information stored in our data centers. We had not heard of a program called PRISM until yesterday.

Second, we provide user data to governments only in accordance with the law. Our legal team reviews each and every request, and frequently pushes back when requests are overly broad or don’t follow the correct process. Press reports that suggest that Google is providing open-ended access to our users’ data are false, period. Until this week’s reports, we had never heard of the broad type of order that Verizon received—an order that appears to have required them to hand over millions of users’ call records. We were very surprised to learn that such broad orders exist. Any suggestion that Google is disclosing information about our users’ Internet activity on such a scale is completely false.

Finally, this episode confirms what we have long believed—there needs to be a more transparent approach. Google has worked hard, within the confines of the current laws, to be open about the data requests we receive. We post this information on our Transparency Report whenever possible. We were the first company to do this. And, of course, we understand that the U.S. and other governments need to take action to protect their citizens’ safety—including sometimes by using surveillance. But the level of secrecy around the current legal procedures undermines the freedoms we all cherish.