Google's legal loss for Street View snooping called 'flawed'

September 15, 2013

A U.S appellate court's decision last week to permit a wiretapping case against Google to proceed, is based on flawed reasoning, a leading technology think-tank says. On September 10, the U.S. Appeals Court for the Ninth Circuit rejected Google's motion to dismiss claims that it had violated the federal Wiretap Act when it collected data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks when capturing Street View photographs. In 2010, Google admitted that its Street View cars had inadvertently captured data transmitted by open Wi-Fi networks in homes and businesses when shooting photographs. The company publicly apologized for what it claimed was an honest mistake and offered to destroy or make inaccessible the nearly 660GB of data it had collected from the networks. Several individuals later sued Google, claiming the company had violated the Wiretap Act, which prohibits the intentional interception of electronic data. In the lawsuit, the plaintiffs noted that Google's Street View cars had recorded a considerable amount of data from open Wi-Fi networks including SSIDs, MAC addresses, and even "payload" data such as personal emails, passwords, videos, and documents. To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here

Link: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2048749/googles-legal-loss-for-street-view-snooping-called-flawed.html#tk.rss_all