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After almost ten years of trial, Google has agreed to pay $ 13 million in a clbad action claiming that its Street View program had collected confidential data over wifi between 2007 and 2010. In addition to the moolah, the regulation – filed Friday in San Francisco – also calls Google to destroy all data collected and teach people to encrypt their wifi networks.
A quick reminder. At the time when Google was starting to roll out its Street View small cars in our neighborhoods, the company had also collected about 600GB of emails, pbadwords and other valuable data from unencrypted wifi networks in more than 30 countries. In a 2010 blog, Google said that the data collection was an "error" after a German data protection group asked to audit the data collected by the cars.
"Simply put, it was a mistake. In 2006, an engineer working on an experimental Wi-Fi project wrote a code that sampled all publicly available Wi-Fi data categories. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic data such as SSID information and MAC addresses, using Google Street View cars, it included this code in the software – although project managers do not want to use useful data. "
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The clbad action was based on Google's violation of federal wiretap laws. Google had argued in a separate case on the same subject, Joffe vs. Google, that its "mistake" was legal because unencrypted wifi is a form of radio communication and is therefore easily accessible to the general public. The courts did not agree, and in 2013 Google's defense was superimposed. And while Google claimed that the collection was a "mistake," according to CNN, in this clbad action, the investigators discovered that Google's engineers had created the software and intentionally incorporated it into Street View cars.
If you thought that Google would pay the price for this brand of harm, you might be wrong. The clbad action brought in $ 13 million with punitive payments being made to the original 22 plaintiffs – the additional clbad members would get nothing. The remaining money will then be distributed to eight data protection and consumer protection organizations. Similarly, another case brought by 38 states, still on the same subject, reported only a settlement of $ 7 million. We contacted Google, but the company declined to comment.
Honestly, this whole saga of Street View reminds us that Google has been so devious for so long, even if its motto was "do not be mean". (For the record, "do not be mean" since his code of conduct.) While we're wary of Google these days, it's worth remembering that Google was not at least a little evil probably never existed.
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