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Google didn't collect the data "by accident". A Google engineer wrote code to specifically capture wi-fi data. However, this was not sanctioned by higher manage

Google didn't collect the data "by accident". A Google engineer wrote code to specifically capture wi-fi data. However, this was not sanctioned by higher management and Google argued that the engineer acted independently and that they had never intended to capture the wi-fi data. This BBC report has a good summary: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23002166 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-23002166 To my mind, this whole episode suggests Google has a rather lax attitude to privacy despite their official statements.

eli 13y ago
Fair enough, I probably used the wrong words there. My point was that it's not like Google had some project to build better advertising profiles of you by driving to your home and sniffing your traffic. Assuming they didn't actually do anything with the collected data and had no intentions to do anything with it, the fact that it was collected doesn't seem like that big a deal to me. I'm not sure it's fair to expect privacy for your unencrypted data that's being broadcast on any unencrypted network. To me, that feels like reading someone else's postcard. It's not a cool thing to do, but is it really like wiretapping? I agree that their response to this news does not inspire, but I wonder if that was an attempt to minimize what had the potential to be really bad PR.