Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Sen. Chuck Grassley is demanding Google explain its own privacy glitch – a problem that appears to be very similar to Facebook's disastrous handling of its interactions with Cambridge Analytica earlier.
In that case, the data of millions of Facebook users got compromised by Facebook's failure to maintain the needed privacy practices.
Grassley now is explaining in a letter to Google that it appeared to have a similar problem – and the same time – yet its officials denied it when he asked earlier.
"Why was this glitch not disclosed to users in March when Google became aware of it?" Grassley demanded in a letter to Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
"Why was this glitch not disclosed to Congress in March when Google became aware of it?"
The commentary at Twitchy, jumping on the dispute, warned, "It is so on! Senate Judiciary shares Grassley letter that could spell serious trouble for Google."
The senator cited reports that Google "exposed the private data" of some 500,000 Google+ users "and then failed to disclose the glitch, despite knowing about it since March."
The reports explained the problem in Google's system "gave outside developers potential access to private Google+ profile data between 2015 and March 2018, when internal investigators discovered and fixed the issue."
That was just at the time Congress was reviewing the Facebook disaster, Grassley said.
"I invited you and the CEO of Twitter to participate [in a hearing]," said Grassley. "I thought it was important to get input from the leading technology companies on how to develop 'rules of the road' that encourage tailored approaches to privacy that satisfy consumer expectations while maintaining incentives for innovation."
Grassley pointed out Google refused to come, claiming the privacy issue didn't involve the company.
"Despite your contention that Google did not have the same data protection failures as Facebook, it appears from recent reports that Google+ had an almost identical feature to Facebook, which allowed third party developers to access information from users as well as private information of those users' connections. Moreover, it appears that you were aware of this issue at the time I invited you to participate in the hearing," he wrote.
The result is that it's now important for the committee to understand how Google manages user privacy.
He asked the company to explain what actions it has taken to ensure user data is private, have any audits been done, or why not, can Google determine what information was turned over to third parties, and was any of that transferred improperly.
.@senjudiciary Chairman @ChuckGrassley calling on Google to explain why it failed to disclose data vulnerability that it was aware of when it refused to testify on data privacy in April.https://t.co/f3MjRqStEn pic.twitter.com/GnPmRYOqIe
— Senate Judiciary (@senjudiciary) October 12, 2018
"This is gonna be good," write Twitchy. "Grab some popcorn."