[governance] Google Wi-Fi gaffe breached Privacy Act

Roland Perry roland at internetpolicyagency.com
Sun Aug 19 12:31:27 EDT 2012


In message <1345283393.42074.YahooMailNeo at web125102.mail.ne1.yahoo.com>, 
at 02:49:53 on Sat, 18 Aug 2012, Imran Ahmed Shah <ias_pk at yahoo.com> 
writes
>Does this action of "Information Collection" by Google really breach 
>the Privacy Act, PIPA

What Google did was to wiretap (and keep) small fragments of the traffic 
on wifi hotpots as they drove past.

That's probably an offence under long standing law in most countries (I 
wouldn't want to start making a list of them off the cuff).

For it to have been a real threat to the persons in question, they would 
have had to refrain from switching on encryption[1] and to have been 
sending/receiving some emails (or whatever) in exactly the few seconds 
the Google Streetcar was listening to that particular hotspot.

[1] Even the simplest type would have been sufficient, the fragments 
captured are not enough to start any useful "cracking".
-- 
Roland Perry

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