Google emails highlight value of location data

Larry Page's Memorial Day weekend email was terse -- "Can I get a response
on this?" -- but the scramble it set off among top Google (GOOG) executives
on a Saturday afternoon illustrates the critical importance the company
places on the data its smartphones use to track their location.

Page had pasted an article in the email saying Motorola planned to use a
competitor's location services in its phones. A detailed memo quickly came
back to Page, Android chief Andy Rubin and other Google executives that not
only said collecting location data from consumers' smartphones was
"extremely valuable to Google," but detailed how the company's problems with
data collection stemmed from a privacy blow-up last spring involving
Google's Street View cars.

"I cannot stress enough how important Google's wifi location database is to
our Android and mobile product strategy," Google location service product
manager Steve Lee wrote. "We absolutely do care about this (decision by
Motorola) because we need wifi data collection in order to maintain and
improve our wifi location service."

Following the privacy furor sparked last week by the discovery of a hidden
tracking file on Apple's

(AAPL) iPhones and iPads, Google and Apple executives are scheduled to
testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee May 10 about how they use
information gathered by smartphones to power their location services.

Those services are vast digital databases that include the physical location
of hundreds of millions of Wi-Fi access points. Smartphones use those
databases as a kind of electronic map to chart their own location in space,
allowing phones to run apps like Foursquare that demand a specific location.

To build those maps, Google and Apple need location data fed from millions
of consumer smartphones that report the location of the Wi-Fi access points
they encounter as users move around each day. Accurate location services
also are critical for companies like Google and Apple to deliver
location-based ads to smartphones -- projected to become a multi-billion
dollar business for those companies.

"Information about the location of WiFi networks improves the accuracy of
the location-based services, such as Google Maps or driving directions, that
Google provides to consumers," Google explained last year in a letter to
U.S. Rep. Henry Waxman of California. "Because GPS and cell tower data can
be unreliable or inaccurate, in some cases using the location of Wi-Fi
access points can enable a smartphone to pinpoint its own location more
quickly and accurately."

The May 29 email exchange between Lee, product executives Jonathan Rosenberg
and John Hanke, Rubin and Page, who is now Google's CEO, happened in the
space of 68 minutes late Saturday afternoon. The email exchange, which this
newspaper obtained, is detailed in court records as part of a lawsuit by
Skyhook Wireless, a Boston company that has provided location services for
Google and Apple. Google declined to comment on the emails.

Last year's Street View privacy controversy began when Google was forced to
admit that its Street View cars had inadvertantly scooped up data from
unsecured home and business Wi-Fi networks in the U.S. and other countries.

The mission of the Street View cars, Google has said, was to map the
location of Wi-Fi networks, not to store so-called "payload data" from them.
The Street View data breach, which resulted in an apology from Google
executives and investigations by regulators in the United States and Europe,
was revealed just two weeks before Page's May 29 email.

Lee's response said Google's decision after the privacy breach to stop using
Street View cars to map Wi-Fi networks made the need for smartphone data all
the more crucial to its location database.

Google had used Street View cars and phone data since 2007 to map Wi-Fi
access points and by last year, Lee said, it had logged the location of over
300 million of them, a vast geographical database that could be used to
pinpoint a smartphone user's location with an accuracy of about 98 feet.

Google says no location data is collected through Android phone unless users
explicitly give permission when they are setting up a new phone.

"All location sharing on Android is opt-in by the user," Google said in a
written statement Thursday."We provide users with notice and control over
the collection, sharing and use of location in order to provide a better
mobile experience on Android devices. Any location data that is sent back to
Google location servers is anonymized and is not tied or traceable to a
specific user."

The opt-in question comes when users are setting up their Android phone,
when users are asked to check a box that reads: "Allow Google's location
service to collect anonymous location data. Collection will occur even when
no applications are running." If they opt-in, users have the option to later
turn off data collection at any time, Google said.

Skyhook sued Google last fall in state court in Massachusetts, charging that
Google interfered with Skyhook's contractual business relationship with
Motorola by pressuring the phone manufacturer to use Google's location
service exclusively instead of allowing both Google and Skyhook's location
services to run on Motorola phones.

Skyhook, which still provides location services for Apple devices like the
iPod Touch running older versions of its operating system, also sued Google
for patent infringement in federal court, claims in the state suit that it
suffered damages "that exceed tens of millions of dollars." The state and
federal cases are pending.