Lawyers Claim Google Wi-Fi Sniffing ‘Is Not an Accident’
June 4th, 2010Via: Gizmodo:
Lawyers suing Google claimed Thursday they have discovered evidence in a patent application that Google deliberately programmed its Street View cars to collect private data from open Wi-Fi networks, despite claims to the contrary.
“At this point, it is our belief that it is not an accident,” said Brooks Cooper, an Oregon attorney suing Google in one of several class actions lawsuits around the country arising from Google’s disclosure that its Street View cars intercepted Wi-Fi traffic around the world. Google has described the sniffing as a coding error.
The evidence, the relevance of which Google disputed Thursday, is a 2008 Google patent application (.pdf) describing a method to increase the accuracy of location-based services – services that would allow advertisers or others to know almost the exact location of a mobile phone or other computing device. The patent application involves intercepting data and analyzing the timing of transmission as part of the method for pinpointing user locations.
The so-called “776? patent application, published by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in January, describes “one or more of the methods” by which Google collects information for its Street View program, Cooper’s legal team said in court documents filed late Wednesday in federal court in Oregon.
Google spokeswoman Christine Chen said in an e-mail that the patent in question “is entirely unrelated to the software code used to collect Wi-Fi information with Street View cars.” In a follow up e-mail, Chen added that Google files “patent applications on a variety of ideas that our engineers come up with. Some of them mature into real products or services, and some of them don’t.”
Chen did not immediately respond to an e-mail asking whether Google has performed the “776? method in practice.
