Google: Better To Seek Forgiveness Than Permission?

For years, Google has been blazing trails in the technology world and along the way they have been caught in a few snares. The latest entanglement wrapped up this week as the company settled a two-year investigation led by an executive committee that represents 38 states and the District of Columbia over the company's unauthorized collection of data from unsecured wireless networks (for historical background see our previous blog posts on this issue here, here, here and here).

Briefly, the investigation centered on Google Street View vehicles which were launched by Google to photograph areas for the Google Street View service.  While collecting data for Street View, the vehicles collected network identification information sent over unsecured wireless networks. Google also gathered payload data that was transmitted over the networks while the vehicles were in the area—including the URLs of requested Web pages, email messages and other private information