back to article Top cops worldwide grill Google over Wi-Fi snoop

Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal on Monday became the latest law enforcement official to order Google to give a detailed accounting of the information its Street View cars surreptitiously sniffed from unsecured Wi-Fi networks over a three-year period. In a letter to Google officials, Blumenthal demanded they …

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  1. WheresWardy

    Just get Google to do the work for you

    You've collected all this data that we've been unable to convince the electorate to allow us to record on them without huge political agro? If you could just give us all the details, that would be perfect.

  2. JasonW
    FAIL

    Once again, UK government is conspicuous...

    ... by it's absence from any calls for the data to be handed over/investigated.

  3. James Woods

    yada yada yada

    you'll never win with google this way.

    what you need to do is tax them.

    You see, googles adwords/adsense have the ability to really devastate small businesses world-wide.

    Say you own a joes coffee shop in a small town in Kentucky. Starbucks or another big coffee corporate wants to run joes out of business. If Joes relies on internet orders Starbucks could buy keywords that would take away Joes searches and give them to google. The higher bidder will win.

    So if google is able to manipulate markets like this, they should be taxed accordingly.

    I think im on to something here, it's the only way you'll get them. Just remember what happens when tax is thrown around at amazon, it's the end of the world.

    Makes sense to me, if you want to build a house or buy land here in the states you pay for your footprint. Whens google going to pay for theirs?

  4. Dino
    Black Helicopters

    farcical really

    If I go around war driving and capturing all data and get caught I'll get thrown in jail..

    Large company?? oh lets share the loot and pretend we're doing something about it...

    Also would it be unreasonable to assume that the kit doesn't discriminate between unencrypted and encrypted traffic? it could just be capturing encrypted and unencrypted traffic and they are just saying well we can't read the encrypted stuff anyway..

    Given that a lot of traffic in general is already to google whether it be from it's services (search, email dns etc) or from ad-sense or analytics and since it knows what the traffic is to itself could it not correlate that with the encrypted captures and could give it a hand in deciphering the encrypted stuff also? It would have to sync the stream to an accurate time source - and it definately has that as there's an active gps recording position at the same time.

    Paranoid ? That's what they were saying when the Germans were poking around google asking what they've been up to then suddenly this came out...

  5. Otto von Humpenstumpf
    FAIL

    Lawsuits all around the world...

    ... but the UK gov't / ICO opts for a telling off: "You've been very naughty boys. Now, promise to not do it again, and hop along now."

    Utter fail. When will somebody PLEASE replace the ICO with something that has grown balls and some teeth?

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Wardriving, not piggybacking

    Don't see the issue myself. If they have been war driving, they've done nothing more than see what is publicly available to anyone. If they've not piggybacked, then I cannot see a crime here.

    People just causing a stir about nothing. There's more important things going on in the world.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      FAIL

      It's not just wardriving...

      They were capturing data...

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