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

pingjam.com

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

#2
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 .

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

#3
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.

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

#4

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.

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

#5
post #4

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://...

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

#6
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.

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

#7
"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!

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

#8

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…

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

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

#9
"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.

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