David Streitfeld:
The prospect of a long-running case in which Google is accused of exploiting that trust and misappropriating data will work against this ambitious program. Google was sued for breaking federal laws by secretly collecting people’s email, passwords and other personal information as part of its Street View mapping project, which began in 2007. The data was drawn from unencrypted household computer networks.
Man, poor Google, ya know?
I personally hope that this case, and Google not getting it dropped, causes Google to actually stop and think about what they are doing. Google has no doubt created some of the best web services out there — I don’t think anyone can deny that. If you live in the Google domain, you have it pretty easy, but Google is doing all of this by plucking away user privacy at an exponential pace.
Show me ads, but don’t delve this deep.
There was no reason for street view cars to collect emails and passwords — none — and yet that’s what Google did. And the best answer that can really be given as to why it was done is simply: because we could? And you simply have to end that statement with a question mark to correctly convey the naive lack of common-sense that Google consistently hides behind.