Yawn: I don't know about you all, but I'm sick to death of the endless detailed reporting of every move in the case of Google's capture of scattered publicly unprotected Wi-Fi network packets. It was a colossal blunder on Google's part, and the firm hasn't handled its negotiations with various governments, local and national, as adeptly as it should.
But I expect it's actually as it seems. Bad program management that led to useless information being collected that wasn't acted on. Google will spend millions in defending itself against lawsuits and settling with governments. The company will agree to outside monitoring of certain behaviors in the future. It will be required to be less aggressive and arrogant in its assertion of rights on the public thoroughfares for Street View in many countries.
It's just not that big of a deal to most people unless an actual privacy breach is demonstrated in which Google was gathering data and associating in its systems in such a way as to render it better able to pinpoint individuals and then target advertisements or other information to them.
I have various news alerts set to trigger for Wi-Fi, and the thousands of stories filed and reprinted around the world have added nearly no information to the topic. Put Google, privacy, and wireless snooping into one story, and I guess it gets traffic. (See what I did just now?)
Ultimately, it was an interesting story, but it's not now unless new information appears; you won't be reading all the daily developments in it here.
Excuse me, but isn't there at least one company, Skyhook, that makes their entire business supplying open wifi navigation databases?
Further, unless they changed the law when nobody was looking, WiFi hot-spots operate under FCC Part 15 rules, and there is *no* prohibition anywhere on operating a radio receiver for Part 15 signals. The only US law prohibiting reception of radio signals is in the ECPA which outlawed the reception of cellular bands.
Simply recording the geolocation of the area where a specific SSID can be heard is certainly not restricted, and you would be hard-pressed to make a case that using just that information for estimating a location is covered by any legal restriction.
I'm not sure that you've been following the story. First, Google told various government entities that it wasn't gathering anything but SSID and related data, and it turned out Google was. Second, the kind of payload data that Google was gathering, while publicly broadcast, isn't necessarily legal to collect. Third, it's an international story. Fourth, even U.S. states have varying laws about the legality of Wi-Fi sniffing.
While scanning to create a geolocation database may be perfectly legal in most countries, Google will likely be forced to agree to limitations because of its unintentional data collection.