privacy concerns in germany

[Felix Nensa]

Today german media was reporting an issue with Google Street View
regarding the collection of data about private APs.
For those who understand german here are two links:

http://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Datenschuetzer-Street-View-Autos-scannen-private-Funknetze-984118.html
http://www.tagesschau.de/inland/google248.html

In summary governmental data privacy activists accuse Google of doing
it illegally and want them to delete all collected data and remove the
Wifi scanning devices from the Street View cars or even better to stop
Street View at all. They say it is not clear why Google collects this
data. They obviously have no clue of using Wifi MAC addresses for geo
positioning. And to make things even more embarrassing for me as a
german they say that these data could be easily used by others to gain
free internet access via unsecured APs.
Until now there is no official response from Google. I guess because
at Google they currently just think... "Eh, what??"

I guess this is currently not directly affecting geomena but I keep
you informed.
Sometimes I really think of moving to the US.

Best,

Felix


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