UPDATED 13:27 EDT / MAY 04 2011

Google’s Location Services Trigger Raid on South Korean Offices

google-android-south-korea It looks like lawsuits and more lawsuits aren’t the only thing that smartphone service carriers like Apple and Google need to worry about—in South Korea it’s lead to a police raid of one of Google’s offices.

According to an article in eWEEK what triggered this raid by South Korean police happens to be a hyperlocal advertisement delivery product owned by Google,

Seoul’s Metropolitan Police Agency (SMPA) descended on Google’s office May 3 looking into allegations that Google’s AdMob platform was used to illegally collect private data about users’ geographical locations. Google purchased AdMob for $700 million last May to help developers insert ads within their applications.

A Google Korea spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal police entered the office to investigate how Android devices collect information about users’ location.

The raid on Google’s office comes days after South Korea’s Korea Communications Commission sent a list of inquiries to Apple Korea unit to clarify how it collects location data from iPhone and iPad users, the Journal added.

This isn’t the only time that Google has seen its offices in South Korea raided by the police. It seems that Google Street View had also prompted an earlier raid during August of last year. Police had taken documents and hard drives as evidence for what the South Korean government claimed was a violation of country’s telecommunications privacy laws.

With details on the raid very sketchy, it’s hard to say exactly what’s going on. However, Google has gone out of its way to state that they are fully cooperating with the Korean government in these matters. “Google will fully cooperate with the investigation,” a spokeswoman said, who also confirmed that Seoul visited the Google offices to collect information on how the Android platform gathers location data on customers.

It also looks like the South Korean government isn’t the only tension that Google is facing in the country, but search engine rivals–Naver and Daum Communications Corp.–are also pointing fingers at the search giant’s operations claiming that they’ve had their applications blocked on the Android platform.

eWEEK says that Google begged to differ as early as April 15th, “Android is an open platform, and carrier and OEM partners are free to decide which applications and services to include on their Android phones.” And Google told Dow Jones Newswires Tuesday that antitrust agencies nor regulators have followed up on these accusations.

Apple themselves have come under scrutiny by the South Korean government—only days before the raid, they’d been queried about similar issues. In the US and Europe, developers caught the iPhone tracking user locations in a similar fashion, but the data was only saved onto the phone itself.


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