Judge OKs Wiretap Lawsuit Over Google Wi-Fi Sniffing

An anonymous reader writes "Last year Google found itself in hot water after admitting to accidentally collecting payload data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks. Their admission led to a number of investigations and complaints around the globe, and a U.S. District Court Judge has now denied Google's motion to dismiss a class-action lawsuit which alleges the search giant violated federal wiretapping laws. 'Judge James Ware drew a distinction in yesterday's ruling between merely accessing an open WiFi network and actually sniffing the individual packets on that network. In the first case, one is only jumping onto a network to send and receives one own communications; in the second case, one is looking into someone else's communications, and doing so in a way that requires nontrivial technical ability or software.'"

Comments

Re:it was authorized by the WAP owners

[symes]

No - it is about reasonable expectations for privacy. To some extent we cannot expect absolute privacy with our neighbours, but we should expect that wholesale corporate intrusions to privacy are scorned upon. Could I, for example, point a higjhly sensitive microphone at someone's house, from a public street, and record their conversation? You could say that unencreypted data is public, but you could also argue that doing so violates the interlocutors expectations of privacy.