Watch out for a Tidal Wave of law suits against Google.
If your home is on Google "Street view". Google may owe you A LOT of money for violating your privacy rights without your authorization.
This was more about the collection of personal data on unencrypted wireless networks, IIRC. That being said, shame on ANYONE who runs an unencrypted wireless network.
I’ve offered to help numerous neighbors who leave their wireless networks open, and most of them take me up on the offer. In this day and age, it’s imperative that you protect your data with every means possible.
The home being on Street View isn’t the issue; it’s whether they “inadvertently” accessed your wifi router.
Maybe so, but probably you'd PAY a lot to lawyers to get a little.
To IT Freepers: Serious question: Is there any way that this information could have been collected by Google inadvertently, as Google maintains?
Lead plaintiff: Horseboy
Everybody should check maps that show views of their house. It’s creepy. A person online can zoom in and identify obscured doors, windows, hidden access through back yards (etc). Criminals can use it to look for potential targets.
They will blur your house if you ask them. I did on mine and it wasn’t a problem. Can’t remember the process I went through.
although you would have to be a complete friggin idiot to not protect your home wifi connection
This has nothing to do with your home being on Streetview.
I had my home blurred out. No kidding, the picture they had up you could see my son walking past the front window (not perfectly, but you could tell it was a kid). It was f’ing creepy. If your home is displayed, you can have them at least blur it out.
I learned the hard way about wifi. When my service provider put the wireless router in and gave me the 10 digit string of characters it called the pass code, I didn’t realize that those 10 digits were just the last 10 digits of the MAC address. Evidently it the default password used by many service providers. My neighbor hacked in and used my connection for downloading copyright material.
When I got an email from the provider I checked it out and fixed things, but most people just use the defaults.
Google needs to be slapped around for participating in data collection efforts on citizens for the Feds and giving them unfettered access to our emails. That and trying to play politics and propaganda machine for them as well. Their latest anti- gun stance is making me look for a better search engine. I don’t wantt o use Bing either because I think they’re every bit as data collective and assist the Feds by giving access to your emails too. Nt that I have anything to he’d but I don’t to be a target because someone in Washingon is bored or wants to make an example of a patriot to further a political agenda either.
Hey, maybe they have those missing IRS emails!
It’s not Google I’m worried about. It’s the hacker looking for personal information that he can use to steal identities, access bank accounts, apply for credit cards, etc., that is the problem. All a hacker needs to do is drive into any neighborhood and collect the data. People shouldn’t be worried about Google when the problem is their own failure to protect their data!
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. ;-}