U.S. regulators end Google 'Street View' inquiry http://www.financialpost.com/news/regulators+Goog...

"But the hue and cry over Google's harmless mistake, with no abuse of the data involved in any way -- while genuine bad guys are still free to collect all of the unsecured Wi-Fi data that they wish for actual exploits -- strikes me as being exploitative behavior by many of the accusers involved." http://www.nnsquad.org/archives/nnsquad/msg04410....

"that can continue to be criminally exploited by crooks -- but will no longer be useful to society at large via legitimate Google-based services" http://lauren.vortex.com/archive/000772.html

BTW, I came in through a link displayed by Google News app on my Nexus One ;)

PCWorld: Google Target of Misdirected Privacy Backlash http://goo.gl/bZUB

It wasn't ill- or good mannered, it was a technical mistake which had nothing to do with ethics.
Besides taking Street View, they were collecting WiFi data to improve location services. "Payload" was an unfortunate by-product. Read something, please!

OK, your last comment is better than initial article itself.

We'll see how big is actual problem for a Google, but in my personal opinion, it's not reality which is causing this, but under-the-hood interests of politics and/or competitors. In other countries politic atmosphere is different and "payload" matter is long closed.

P.S. I am Google fan and never used Apple products, but those antenna issues were much smaller than media presented it. In technical tests they didn't find increased drop calls, etc. (don't have links now)

http://www.buzzmachine.com/2010/05/17/

Again, they used off-the-shelf app which they failed to sanitize. They admitted it. They even discovered it, if I'm not mistaken (an audit they ordered). Application which they did not design collected fractures of seconds of openly broadcast data along with WiFi information they were actually collecting for making location-based services to work more precise. It was an unfortunate mistake. Because of the following opposition raised by people who are making their living out of finding errors and inflating hysteria - hurting evolution of the Web - because of that opposition Google was forced not to use that WiFi data and make location services to work less precise. There was an investigation, and most of the countries already agreed that it was an unfortunate mistake. Still few alarmists like yourself trying to revive a half-dead sensation for mysterious purposes.

Do you know that application Google used to collect WiFi data wasn't even developed by them? Google bought an application and wasn't careful enough to check it in more details before using it. They never specifically extracted accidentally collected "payload" data and sure never used it. Don't you, who position yourself to be related to Chrome OS, understand that all that hysteria is initiated by Google's competitors but still hurts to WWW overall - and you are adding to that harm?

Why do you publish as something sensational 5-month old news which was long ago understood as mostly BS?