If Google had a gun… (or – shoot your developers first, ask questions later) | Hacker News Reader

If Google had a gun… (or – shoot your developers first, ask questions later)

pingjam.com

15 pointscodeinvain18 comments

"He told him that we could not share any non-public 3rd party contact information without the explicit consent of that 3rd party. Although this is much stricter than the strictest legal opinions we had – we had no choice but to abide."

So you reluctantly stopped stealing people's data? It's hard to have sympathy when you're complaining about Google protecting people's privacy!

No stealing what so ever ,see Elnor's response : http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4175896 .

"He told him that we could not share any non-public 3rd party contact information without the explicit consent of that 3rd party."

The European Data Directive, which Google is subject to, does prohibit this practice. Enforcement on this in the EU is sketchy but Google is already under the microscope in the EU for many other practices.

And their revision of only pulling from public sources isn't quite that clear. If they are aggregating that data then it could be considered transforming pseudo-anonymous data to something that is personally identifiable -- or at least the risk of that.

I don't agree with these laws and regulations and I can sympathize with the company but Google is really just protecting themselves.

yes but at what cost? , wouldn't it be better that google will have some sort of approval process like in the apple store. at least there you know where you stand.

I don't think that a publicly available database means that you can use their data without consent. In Germany any collection of data might fall under the protection of copyright (or you could even patent a data collection, if I am not mistaken). Telephone books, for example, are free for anyone. But you can't go ahead and scan the pages and provide a service that parses through the data.

My guess is that the sources you use might be free to use but not necessarily free to integrate into a software product. Even if there are APIs available I would check your sources to see if there are special rules for commercial products or applications that access the data massively.

In Canada, raw data (such as telephone book listings) are not copyrightable[0]. The graphics and layout of the phone book pages are, but the data is not.

[0] http://www.lmlaw.ca/copyright_raw_data.pdf

Same in the US, as I understand it.

In the US what matters with something that consists of an aggregation of facts is how much creativity is involved in selecting and arranging and presenting the facts. (I said "aggregation of facts" rather than the more natural "collection of facts" because a "collective" has specific meaning in copyright law and I didn't want that to lead to any confusion).

The most important case in this area is FEIST PUBLICATIONS, INC. v. RURAL TELEPHONE SERVICE CO., 499 U.S. 340 (1991). In this case, the Court rejected the idea that copyright is meant to reward effort (the so-called "sweat of the brow" theory) and they based this on Constitutional considerations rather than on a reading of the copyright statute. The Constitution requires that there be some creativity, although they said that the amount required is not very much--a spark of creativity is enough.

In the case of Feist, what was being copied was a telephone book. The entries consisted of all subscribers, in alphabetical order, and the company that produced the book was required by law to produce it. The Court said that there was no creativity in this, and so there could be no copyright even though making the directory took considerable time and money.

If the directory had been a subset of subscribers, selected in some way that shows creativity, arranged in some creative way, then copyright would have been possible.

I remember a German or European court ruling that states that as soon as a measurable effort is needed to collect the data it might be protected by copyright--could even be the effort to create a management or collection software. At least, I think that was the case but I might be mistaken. Also, I do not remember what kind of data collection this related to in the first place.

Does that then mean that only the first collector is allowed to collect, even if subsequent collections are independent efforts?

you are absolutely right, a part of our effort running a global service is complying with different countries rules and regulations.

Looking at this from Google's perspective I can't really blame them for what they're doing although its unfortunate they aren't being more forthcoming with you. Your app, while a great idea, has serious privacy ramifications and Google will receive a lot of the backlash if its covered by mainstream media in an unfavorable light.

on the other hand , google play approved white pages app which reveals not only your name but also your physical address.

further more to remove yourself from white pages listing you need to pay a monthly fee.

Welcome to working with large corporations. Not only does the left hand not know what the right hand is doing, the fingers are pretty much in the dark, too.

Thanks for the comments and don't get us wrong, we fully agree that everyone's privacy should be respected. This is why we started this endeavor by consulting a crack team of lawyers and by surveying a lot of users to understand where the line is drawn by both. We went for the less invasive option, and when all was said and done - almost all we did that exposed any 3rd party details was to show you the name of the person that is calling you. After all, if they are calling you they either want to share their name with you anyway or they are shady to begin with. Again no problem with having clear directions and following them. Huge problem with arbitrary, terminal decisions that come without dialogue or an opportunity to understand what is deemed wrong.

This is a second post (of many more it seems...) in the saga of pingjam's play (store) adventures. In the past month we have been working our asses off because of google's store random bans and lack of communication.

Since Google is blatantly ignoring us - we would appreciate any comments and experience you have and are happy to share ours as well .

You should consider caching your post before putting it here. Google doesn't seem to have a cached version either and I'm unable to read your post because your site is down.

Cached version has finally come through: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

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