Judge rules against Google in Street View 'Wi-Spy' lawsuit

01.07.2011
A federal judge has declined to dismiss charges against Google that it allegedly violated the Federal Wiretap Act when it collected personal data from Wi-Fi networks.

U.S. District Court Judge James Ware on Wednesday tossed accusations that Google's Street View vehicles broke several states' laws when they harvested usernames, passwords and emails from consumers' and businesses' wireless networks, but allowed the claim that the company violated federal law to continue.

Google's Street View vehicles began cruising American roads in 2007 as part of the company's mapping program. Along with snapping photographs of each street and collecting GPS data, the vehicles also mapped the location of Wi-Fi networks to build a database that could be accessed by mobile devices to determine users' whereabouts.

Google acknowledged the privacy problem in May 2010, but said collection of personal data from Wi-Fi hotspots had been inadvertent. The company for adding code to the Wi-Fi location detection software.

Although Google initially said that the packet sniffer grabbed only data fragments, it later acknowledged that the vehicles had harvested complete usernames and passwords from unprotected wireless networks, as well as emails.

To arrive at his ruling, Ware threaded his way though years of legislative history of federal privacy laws related to over-the-air communications, and even went to the Oxford English Dictionary in an attempt to define "radio communications."