[spec_laconic]

I'm going to go ahead and play devil's advocate; I think concern over this is really overblown. There are two things about this case that I don't really get:

1. If you're blasting your data over an unencrypted wifi connection, do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy? This seems to be equivalent to someone screaming the contents of their email, and then getting angry at you for eavesdropping. Also, who the hell transfers that kind of data over anything but SSL?

2. What was Google trying to get out of these packets, besides wifi-GPS data? This seems like more of a simple overstep of collection than anything else. Do we seriously think that this data was collected maliciously? They already have the majority of people's data, what more would they be trying to get? After all of my DNS lookups, my GPS coordinates, my email, and my social connections, what more is there?

[pdonis]

> If you're blasting your data over an unencrypted wifi connection, do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy? This seems to be equivalent to someone screaming the contents of their email, and then getting angry at you for eavesdropping.

Exactly. I agree with other commenters that Google is not to be trusted, but I think this article isn't even specific to Google--it's just another illustration that unencrypted Wifi is public, and anyone with half a clue should know that by now.

[DanBC]

> 1. If you're blasting your data over an unencrypted wifi connection, do you have a reasonable expectation of privacy?

Yes, you have a reasonable expectation of privacy. Connecting to someone's unsecured wifi is a criminal offence; scooping data from that connection maybe in some jurisdictions.

People may be stupid for not securing their wifi. But no-one at Google is stupid. They don't have that excuse.

> Do we seriously think that this data was collected maliciously?

Not being evil isn't a magic pass for being daft. Google should have known better. The engineer raised concerns, so at least one person knew it might have been a problem. Google has lived through years of people being concerned about privacy. How can they get something so simple so wrong?

[Karunamon]

>Connecting to someone's unsecured wifi is a criminal offence

Not necessarily. Check your local laws, and be aware that they will almost certainly differ from those elsewhere. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legality_of_piggybacking

[DanBC]

True. I should have added "[...] in the UK".

[wickedchicken]

> Connecting to someone's unsecured wifi is a criminal offence

what if the SSID is 'freewifi'?