Google fined for collecting WiFi data from hotspots in France

Mark Frauenfelder 4:47 pm Mon Mar 21, 2011

Photo by Sunghwan Yoon. Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license.

Google's cute Street View cars were caught snorking private data from WiFi hotspots as they putt-putted their way through France. Now they must pay a US$142,000 fine. Sergei et Larry, vous mauvais garçons!

For example, at 12:45 p.m. on June 2, 2008, at an address in Marseille, France, precisely located by its GPS coordinates, Google recorded the username and password of someone logging into a pornographic website. On March 26, 2009, at 3:03 p.m., Google recorded the username and password of someone logging into a site used to arrange sexual encounters with strangers, along with the person's location along a sparsely populated rural road north of the town of Carcasonne, France.

Other examples cited included details of a patient's care from a medical information system, and an exchange of e-mail messages between two people apparently organizing an adulterous affair.

France fines Google for Street View collection of Wi-Fi data

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