Google may face further WiFi snooping investigation by British ICO

I read, "We are currently studying the FCC report to see if we can extort some more money out of Google to pad our bottom line" a spokesperson for the ICO said in a statement.

Well, that's the funny thing about committing crimes - you leave yourself open to further compromise and external influence. Google could have said this was a rogue engineer war-driving when he was supposed to be mapping, but they didn't. Nor did they bring everything they had to bear in defending themselves openly. Instead they pulled every dirty trick they could to thwart a case from being built at all, and paid off enough officials to get away with it. That says pretty clearly they knew <b>exactly</b> what they were doing. You don't collect <b>usernames and passwords</b> by mistake. Google makes their money from monitoring everything people do - even those who never use their services. The mapping car scandal shows just how far their willing to go when it comes to selling you out. The only ironic part in this whole mess is the British government acting concerned about <I>the privacy of its citizens</I>.