Google charged for 'wrongly' snooping-on people's data during Street View project

A federal appeals court has ruled that Google wrongly collected people’s web activities through their Wi-Fi systems as part of its Street View mapping project.

The US Court of Appeals said that the data transmitted over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks was captured by Google included emails, usernames, passwords, images, and documents.

Google had argued that their activities were exempt from the wiretap law because data transmitted over a Wi-Fi network is a ‘radio communication’ and is readily accessible to the public, Fox News reports.

However, the court dismissed the claim of the search giant and ruled that even if people connect to a neighbour’s unencrypted Wi-Fi network, they do not typically mistakenly intercept, store and decode data transmitted by other devices on the network.

The search giant’s Street View cars with pole mounted cameras on their roofs, photograph along roadways the world over and the photos of homes, cars and shops, etc. show up on Street View map.

The report said that the cameras weren’t only taking photographs but also intercepting data transmitted over Wi-Fi networks they passed through.

Meanwhile, Google has apologized for the snooping that took place between 2008 and March 2010 and has promised to stop collecting the data adding that the practice, conducted in more than 30 countries, was inadvertent but not illegal, the report added.