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Google Relents, Will Hand Over European Wi-Fi Data
itwbennett writes "Having previously denied demands from Germany that the company turn over hard drives with data it secretly collected from open wireless networks over the past three years, Google has reversed course. A Google representative said that it will hand over the data to German, French, and Spanish authorities within a matter of days, according to the Financial Times, which first reported this latest development on Wednesday. 'We screwed up. Let's be very clear about that,' Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the newspaper."
They opened the can of worms by announcing that they had collected it. If they stayed silent, and shredded the data quietly, they'd probably wouldn't be in this mess and no one would have known they ever did it. Google instead has been trying to make this situation 'right' by being transparent about it, and no one gives a crap about it. The governments certainly are going to grab that data, use it as evidence to prosecute Google, and keep it around for ~other reasons~ for years upon years.
eh.. you do know that they only announced this after governments in Europe requested to audit their data collection in general? The ball was already rolling on this, and they were smart in rolling with it. But this was not something Google just announced out of the blue on their own without outside pressure.
And Google has a patent pending on the method they used to collect this data.. Accident my ass.