Out-Law News 1 min. read
04 May 2011, 2:24 pm
The Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency suspects the company's mobile advertising platform AdMob of illegally collecting personal location information without consent, the reports said.
Secured hard drives and computer data related to AdMob were taken from the company's southern Seoul office yesterday, according to South Korean news agency YonHap.
"We suspect AdMob collected personal location information without consent or approval from the Korean Communication Commission," a South Korean police official said.
A Google spokesperson confirmed that the police had visited its local office, and said the company was cooperating with its investigation.
The raid is a second recent setback for Google's Korean operations. Last month, the country's two largest internet search portals filed a complaint with the Korea's Fair Trade Commission alleging Google was limiting their access to its Android smartphone platform.
Google is one of the smallest internet search engines by use on home and office computers in South Korea, but has a near 20% share in the mobile internet market, according to the Reuters report.
The company purchased mobile advertising company AdMob for $750million in November 2009 in order to tap the growing business of targeting advertising to mobile internet users.
Location information is viewed as crucial to the mobile advertising sector, as it helps to personalise online advertising according to individual preferences or locations.
Seoul police also raided the offices of Daum Communications, one of the Korean web portals involved in the competition complaint, over similar suspicions.
Google last fell foul of South Korea's privacy regulations in January, when its controversial Street View cars were found to have collected emails and other personal information from 600,000 of the country's homes and businesses after a National Police Agency investigation.
Other countries including the UK, Canada, Australia and Spain have voiced similar concerns after Google admitted to mistakenly collecting sensitive information from unsecured wi-fi networks with the mapping cars, which take panoramic pictures of city streets.
The investigation highlights increasing concern about user location data collected from mobile devices without consent.
Last month, Apple was forced to defend its use of location data after reports that files containing coordinates for longitude and latitude along with the time that the information was recorded were automatically copied and stored, unencrypted, from the company's mobile devices without consent.
The Korea Communications Commission, South Korea's telecommunications regulator, recently asked Apple's Korea operation to clarify how it collects location data from iPhone and iPad users, Bloomberg reports.
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