Lucille
09-15-2013, 10:27 AM
Google May Owe You Money
http://business.time.com/2013/09/13/why-google-may-owe-you-money/
If Google put your house on Street View between 2007 and 2010, the company might (eventually) owe you money.
In a blow to Google, on Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California rejected the search giant’s request to dismiss a lawsuit over the company’s collection of personal data over private residential Wi-Fi networks. Google vehicles collected the data—including personal emails and passwords—as they drove past homes to photograph them for Street View, the system that creates photo panoramas for Google Maps.
The appeals court ruled that information passed over home Wi-Fi networks is private and protected under federal wiretapping law. Google had argued that Wi-Fi signals coming out of private homes are equivalent to radio communication and therefore legally accessible by the public. The Ninth Circuit didn’t agree. It deemed residential wireless communication private, an important step toward setting boundaries for privacy in an age where technology has moved far-faster than the law.
[...]
If the case goes to trial, the lawyers will get their hands on exactly what Google collected, what the firm did with the data, and who was responsible. Jeffrey Kodroff, a Philadelphia lawyer and co-lead counsel in for the plaintiffs, is confident that is a likely outcome. Google will have to turn over a 600-gigabyte database of information it’s collected. Based on a rough analysis that estimates the average email consists of 2,000 to 10,000 bites of data, Kodroff says, that database could include 60 million emails.
Ultimately, Google could be liable to pay damages to millions of people—at a payout of $100 to $10,000 each, according to the wiretapping law. Even for Google, with its $50 billion cash stockpile, that would not be an insignificant sum. “This is potentially the single biggest wiretapping case in world history. They did this in tens of millions of American’s homes,” says Scott Cleland, a publisher of a Google watchdog site who consults for some of Google’s competitors.
More at the link. h/t http://www.backwoodshome.com/blogs/ClaireWolfe/2013/09/14/saturday-links/
http://business.time.com/2013/09/13/why-google-may-owe-you-money/
If Google put your house on Street View between 2007 and 2010, the company might (eventually) owe you money.
In a blow to Google, on Tuesday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California rejected the search giant’s request to dismiss a lawsuit over the company’s collection of personal data over private residential Wi-Fi networks. Google vehicles collected the data—including personal emails and passwords—as they drove past homes to photograph them for Street View, the system that creates photo panoramas for Google Maps.
The appeals court ruled that information passed over home Wi-Fi networks is private and protected under federal wiretapping law. Google had argued that Wi-Fi signals coming out of private homes are equivalent to radio communication and therefore legally accessible by the public. The Ninth Circuit didn’t agree. It deemed residential wireless communication private, an important step toward setting boundaries for privacy in an age where technology has moved far-faster than the law.
[...]
If the case goes to trial, the lawyers will get their hands on exactly what Google collected, what the firm did with the data, and who was responsible. Jeffrey Kodroff, a Philadelphia lawyer and co-lead counsel in for the plaintiffs, is confident that is a likely outcome. Google will have to turn over a 600-gigabyte database of information it’s collected. Based on a rough analysis that estimates the average email consists of 2,000 to 10,000 bites of data, Kodroff says, that database could include 60 million emails.
Ultimately, Google could be liable to pay damages to millions of people—at a payout of $100 to $10,000 each, according to the wiretapping law. Even for Google, with its $50 billion cash stockpile, that would not be an insignificant sum. “This is potentially the single biggest wiretapping case in world history. They did this in tens of millions of American’s homes,” says Scott Cleland, a publisher of a Google watchdog site who consults for some of Google’s competitors.
More at the link. h/t http://www.backwoodshome.com/blogs/ClaireWolfe/2013/09/14/saturday-links/