FTA:<p>> their investigations revealed that some incredibly private information was harvested in some cases.<p>Well now, slow down. If someone transmits information into the public airspace in a public street, that data can no longer be referred to as <i>private</i>.<p>If Google had been breaking WEP while they drove along they would be violating people's "reasonable expectations" of their privacy. But there's no reasonable expectation of privacy if you're broadcasting radio signals that contain your passwords. That's just dumb.
It's a pity that <i>this</i> is the digital privacy case that the media and politicians decided to run with.<p>There are legitimate unanswered questions about what privacy means in an increasingly networked world... but what to do with personal information broadcasted in the clear and recorded <i>by accident</i> is not one of them.
This quote is taken out of context. Google was not specifically collecting emails, URLs, and passwords. They were collecting packets. Collect enough packets, and you will wind up with emails, URLs, and passwords in the data.<p>From the article, from Alan Eustace's (Senior VP Research & Engineering) quote:<p>>It’s clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords.
So, these people should be using secure wireless. If I have a loudspeaker playing my phone call into the air, I wouldn't complain that someone else heard it. If I taped a giant banner with my email into the side of my house, someone might take a photo.<p>If Google cracked my WEP key or something, that would be notable.
This makes Google a white-hat hacker that shows a security problem. I've just been to Spain and was able to connect to unencrypted wifi spots on almost every street-corner with my phone.