Google loses appeal in Street View privacy case
Reuters – 9 hours ago
By Jonathan Stempel
(Reuters) - A federal appeals court rejected Google Inc's
bid to dismiss a lawsuit accusing it of violating federal wiretap law when its
accidentally collected emails and other personal data while building its
popular Street View program.
The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to exempt
Google from liability under the federal Wiretap Act for having inadvertently
intercepted emails, user names, passwords and other data from private Wi-Fi
networks to create Street View, which provides panoramic views of city streets.
"It's a landmark decision that affirms the privacy
of electronic communications for wireless networks," said Marc Rotenberg,
executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington,
D.C.
"Many Internet users depend on wireless networks to
connect devices in their homes, such as printers and laptops, and companies
should not be snooping on their communications or collecting private
data."
Writing for a three-judge panel, Circuit Judge Jay Bybee
said Wi-Fi communications did not qualify as a "radio communication,"
or an "electronic communication" that was "readily accessible to
the general public," such that Google deserved an exemption from the
Wiretap Act.
"Even if it is commonplace for members of the
general public to connect to a neighbor's unencrypted Wi-Fi network,"
Bybee wrote, "members of the general public do not typically mistakenly
intercept, store, and decode data transmitted by other devices on the
network."
A Google spokeswoman said: "We are disappointed in
the Ninth Circuit's decision and are considering our next steps."
Elizabeth Cabraser, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said she
is pleased with the decision, and "reassured that our courts continue to
uphold personal privacy as an important value."
The lawsuit arose soon after the Mountain View,
California-based company publicly apologized in May 2010 for having collected
fragments of "payload data" from unsecured wireless networks in more
than 30 countries.
Google was accused of having collected the data while
driving its vehicles through neighborhoods from 2008 to 2010 to collect photos
for Street View.
SETTLEMENT WITH STATES
In June 2011, U.S. District Judge James Ware in San
Francisco allowed plaintiffs in several consolidated private lawsuits to pursue
federal Wiretap Act claims against Google, while dismissing California state
law claims.
Upholding that ruling, Bybee said Google's
"expansive" view of the Wiretap Act's exceptions would have produced
the "absurd" result that the law's protections would depend on
whether a recipient of communications was using a secure network.
He said this could, in theory, allow someone to park
outside the home or office of a person using an unsecured network, and without
penalty use a "packet sniffer," a device that captures data being
transmitted over a network, to intercept an email intended for that person
because it was readily accessible.
"Surely Congress did not intend to condone such an
intrusive and unwarranted invasion of privacy when it enacted the Wiretap Act
'to protect against the unauthorized interception of electronic
communications,'" he said.
Eighteen individual plaintiffs are named in the appeal.
In March, Google agreed to pay $7 million to settle a
probe into the matter involving 38 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. As
part of that settlement, Google agreed to destroy data collected in the United
States.
The Electronic Privacy Information Center is a nonprofit
that in court papers urged the upholding of Ware's ruling.
The case is Google Inc v. Joffe et al, 9th U.S. Circuit
Court of Appeals, No. 11-17483.
(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel in New York; Editing by
Bernadette Baum and Carol Bishopric)
Comments
Post a Comment