Court Says Privacy Case Can Proceed vs. Google
By DAVID STREITFELD, NYT
SAN FRANCISCO — In a major legal setback for Google, a federal appeals court here said on Tuesday that a lawsuit accusing the Internet giant of illegal wiretapping could proceed.
The ruling, which comes at a moment when online privacy is being hotly debated, has its origins in a much-publicized Google initiative, Street View, which tried to map the inhabited world.
In addition to photographs, Street View vehicles secretly collected e-mail, passwords, images and other personal information from unencrypted home computer networks.
The scooping of data brought outrage and investigations in at least a dozen countries when it was first revealed in Germany in 2010. It also prompted a handful of lawsuits by United States citizens who said Google had violated their privacy and was illegally wiretapping them. Those suits were condensed into one case, which was heard by a California court.
Google tried to get the case dismissed, saying the Wi-Fi communications it captured were “readily accessible to the general public” and therefore not a violation of federal wiretapping laws. The lower court rejected that argument, and on Tuesday the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit did too.
(More here.)
SAN FRANCISCO — In a major legal setback for Google, a federal appeals court here said on Tuesday that a lawsuit accusing the Internet giant of illegal wiretapping could proceed.
The ruling, which comes at a moment when online privacy is being hotly debated, has its origins in a much-publicized Google initiative, Street View, which tried to map the inhabited world.
In addition to photographs, Street View vehicles secretly collected e-mail, passwords, images and other personal information from unencrypted home computer networks.
The scooping of data brought outrage and investigations in at least a dozen countries when it was first revealed in Germany in 2010. It also prompted a handful of lawsuits by United States citizens who said Google had violated their privacy and was illegally wiretapping them. Those suits were condensed into one case, which was heard by a California court.
Google tried to get the case dismissed, saying the Wi-Fi communications it captured were “readily accessible to the general public” and therefore not a violation of federal wiretapping laws. The lower court rejected that argument, and on Tuesday the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit did too.
(More here.)
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