Reports: Government examining Google, mobile apps

Apr 5, 2011, 17:43 GMT

San Francisco - The US government is stepping up its oversight of the sprawling technology companies that have become so central to modern life.

The Federal Trade Commission is considering a wide-ranging probe into Google's dominance of web search, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, and is awaiting a decision by the Justice Department on whether to authorize the company's planned acquisition of travel software giant ITA before proceeding.

Google conducts some 67 per cent of Internet searches in the United States, according to ComScore market research, making it a natural target for official scrutiny.

Google is already facing investigations by the European Commission and the state of Texas. Last week the web search giant settled a privacy complaint by the FTC with an agreement to allow federal officials to audit the company's privacy policies for the next 20 years.

Regulators are also focusing on potential privacy violations in mobile apps both for Google's Android smartphone software and its rival Apple's iPhone.

Music-streaming service Pandora said it had been subpoenaed by a federal grand jury, which is investigating whether such apps illegally obtain or transmit information about their users without proper disclosures, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Pandora disclosed the subpoena in an updated filing for its initial public offering. The company said that it was not a 'specific target' of the investigation and that it believed that similar subpoenas had been issued 'on an industrywide basis to the publishers of numerous other smartphone applications.'

The report said that the criminal investigation was examining whether app makers were violating computer fraud laws by not accurately disclosing the information they collect about users, including location, phone and personal identification and usage patterns.

A report by the newspaper in December found that more than half of the 101 popular apps that it tested transmitted such information to outsiders, including advertising networks.

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