Posted on 06/30/2014 10:07:27 PM PDT by Jim Robinson
(Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday rejected Google Inc's bid to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of violating federal wiretap law when it accidentally collected emails and other personal data while building its popular Street View program.
The justices left intact a September 2013 ruling by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which refused to exempt Google from liability under the federal Wiretap Act for having inadvertently intercepted emails, user names, passwords and other data from private Wi-Fi networks to create Street View, which provides panoramic views of city streets.
The lawsuit arose soon after the Mountain View, California-based company publicly apologized in May 2010 for having collected fragments of "payload data" from unsecured wireless networks in more than 30 countries.
Google was accused of having collected the data while driving its vehicles through neighborhoods from 2008 to 2010 to collect photos for Street View.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
So you don’t care that Google could virtually identify all of the comments you’ve posted on FR back to your Gmail ID? FR runs GoogleAnalytics on every page.
I get the sense that this is from wide open connections. Everybody on your street is smart about it or has a newer router which encourages encryption.
Google Analytics isn’t “SUPPOSED” to be that naughty even though it’s the same firm. It’s “SUPPOSED” to be registering activity statistics so Jim Rob can go look at them later. Oh, during this or that political event, of everything that Google Analytics analyzed, FR shot up to #XX.
It’s just it bugs me that there might be side channels via which Google can deduce more. I went back and checked, and what Google knew about was a car repair garage that I had visited in Maryland, which long ago I had used Google Maps to find. (I had used it to find other places, such as churches I wanted to visit and stores I wanted to shop at, but Google gave no clue it knew about those.) But — my cookies are now long gone and so is my Google stored data. So how did Google know. It is to be curious as a whole cattery.
I don’t necessarily have to trespass to see you leaving your windows open, doors unlocked, putting a spare key under a garden gnome, what times you come and go, where you go, etc. Are you sure you wouldn’t mind if I compiled a database with all of your security information, and published it?
Well as much as I may not like that, there’s nothing in the law preventing you from doing so.
Anybody, including Google, the NSA, even you, could do that just by looking at my posting history.
I've used Google Analytics before myself. It's a free, anonymous service from Google to help webmasters know more about their visitors. It's harmless. Which is why it is the only tracking service I let Ghostery use. All the others, and there are a bunch, are turned off.
Oh, and every Gmail ID I have is fake. I don't use Gmail.
Sorry, but a ‘random’ packet would only consist of X number of bytes. Hardly a full e-mail, let alone anything else of ‘value’. At least, from the article, it appears they were war-driving...nothing ‘accidental’ in that regards.
Depends on the size of the Email. Typical packets are about 1400 bytes.
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