Posted on 07/01/2014 6:10:55 AM PDT by Enlightened1
e U.S. Supreme Court has decided not to hear an appeal by Google over whether it violated federal wiretapping law when its Street View mapping cars collected consumers' personal data.
That leaves intact a federal appeals court ruling that the U.S. Wiretap Act protects the privacy of information on unencrypted in-home Wi-Fi networks and means Google can face lawsuits over the matter, according to a Bloomberg report.
The issue stems from Google's Street View, a comprehensive mapping program that provides images of areas around the world. Google has admitted that its camera-equipped Street View cars inadvertently captured emails, passwords and other data from unprotected wireless networks as they drove by.
In a statement, a Google spokesman said the Mountain View, Calif., company was disappointed that the Supreme Court had declined to hear the case.
In March 2013, Google agreed to pay a $7-million fine for collecting personal data from millions of unsecured wireless networks while operating its Street View fleet. The fine settled an investigation of the data collection by 38 states and the District of Columbia.
As part of that agreement, Google promised to educate employees about the privacy of consumer data and sponsor a public service campaign to teach people how to secure their wireless networks. Google also agreed to destroy the data it collected.
(Excerpt) Read more at latimes.com ...
Sure, but they can case your property online instead of the riskier proposition of getting caught doing so in person.
Look at the wireless icon on your device. Is there a little lock next to it? If not, then no, you are not.
Most likely if you’re using a password, you’re using some sort of encryption. WEP is very weak and was cracked years ago. Unless you’re using a 15+ character password for WEP, you’re vulnerable. If you’re using WPA, you should be okay for the time being.
They had a wireless device that basically sniffed all of the wireless connections it could find as the car drove through your neighborhood. If you had a wide open wireless network, they captured as much information as possible about your home network: nodes, infrastructure types, MAC addresses, etc.
Are you trolling? Street View is a burglar’s best resource these days. It takes virtually no time, no effort, and no expense; no person or driveway security camera can see you; the pictures are always taken during sunny days; you can also take your time figuring out the quickest way to the nearest interstate on-ramp (for car thieves); and you can easily see what else is and isn’t (police stations) in the neighborhood.
And you won’t get the other information you mentioned — how many people live there, when the owners are home — in person without repeated visits.
It is different. Google eliminates the need to drive around a nice neighborhood and risk being seen. Street View lets the criminals scout out potential targets from the privacy and comfort of their mama’s basements.
You should NEVER TRUST anybody, group, business, govt, entity that steals ANYTHING from you period.
If they had respect for you, then they would not try to take it behind your back.
If you worked with someone that you liked and they stole from you. Say you caught them stealing and lying to you. You mean to tell me you would STILL TRUST THEM????
“Look at the wireless icon on your device. Is there a little lock next to it? If not, then no, you are not.”
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No lock,so I guess I’m not.
Thanks.
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Thanks——the PC I’m using is the one I had when I had the wireless installed.
I’ll have to pursue this further.
Lordy,things are complicated now. I remember when we had a dimmer switch installed in our dining room and I thought it was an absolute miracle. :-)
.
Put your neighbors address in this website and tell me if you are surprised.
http://www.whitepages.com/neighbors
I reckun the penalty should be the seizure of GooGle and the distribution of all profits derived by stealing data to all legal homeowners of this land for how many years now?
Weird cuz my new neighbor is a Goog noob.. you can see his and my house.. for a fee. ;-}
They can’t get all of the information they need to rob your house from a street picture. They can’t tell when people are home, or if there is a security system installed. They don’t know if the house has changed since the picture was taken. To get the kind of information they need, they really are going to have to physically check the place.
All of that info can be obtained from a paper map. I doubt that the slight bit of extra info a burglar can get from a street picture of the house is really going to enable them to burglarize the place. They would have no way of knowing, for example, if the nice Mercedes parked in the driveway belongs to the current or former owner of that house, or if its owner just happened to be visiting the day the Google car came by. And so on.
True, Google gives the address of whatever you are looking at in street view... but someone driving through your neighborhood looking for a house to rob would get the address, too.
As for people stealing your information, they do that every time you use the internet—or a credit card or store card. Every time you do that, you are sending all kinds of data about yourself to all kinds of data collectors. I booked a vacation, and started seeing ads to visit the destination. Everything on the internet, even my junk email, is tailored to me. I’m pretty sure that even the Google searches are tailored to the user, based on past history.
In other words, it’s a bit late to worry about whether your data is being collected. It is, and not just by Google.
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