Would you mind citing specifically where the court says the collection of data packets was intentional? I'd prefer not to read the whole document, and as a casual observer of the case that comes as a surprise.
Why would Google intentionally save random stray packets of unencrypted wifi networks? What purpose would that serve?
Google didn't collect the data "by accident". A Google engineer wrote code to specifically capture wi-fi data. However, this was not sanctioned by higher management and Google argued that the engineer acted independently and that they had never intended to capture the wi-fi data.
Fair enough, I probably used the wrong words there. My point was that it's not like Google had some project to build better advertising profiles of you by driving to your home and sniffing your traffic. Assuming they didn't actually do anything with the collected data and had no intentions to do anything with it, the fact that it was collected doesn't seem like that big a deal to me.
I'm not sure it's fair to expect privacy for your unencrypted data that's being broadcast on any unencrypted network. To me, that feels like reading someone else's postcard. It's not a cool thing to do, but is it really like wiretapping?
I agree that their response to this news does not inspire, but I wonder if that was an attempt to minimize what had the potential to be really bad PR.
