Google

I'm astounded that this whole Google privacy mud slinging exercise is still going on. As usual the frenzy is being whipped up by the people that have no idea what the real issue is.

Here's what happened. Google sent out its Street View cars to photograph every street in the world in order to improve its comprehensive online maps service. It also monitored any wifi signals it happened to pick up while driving along. The gps coordinates of the wifi signals were logged in order to improve location based services and search.

When a domestic wifi router broadcasts its signal it sends out a unique MAC address. No other router has the same one, and it was this information that Google was interested in.  Unfortunately some second hand computer code was used to capture the data and it also ended up capturing some data that was being broadcast by the wifi routers and computers attached to it.  This included e-mails, website addresses and any other traffic normally sent between computers at home.  

However, some people are silly enough to leave their wifi router's security switched off, leaving their whole network vulnerable to snoopers. Would you willfully let your neighbours go looking through all your computer's contents?  So the only data that was captured by the Google cars was snippets of data, as much as you can pick up in a few seconds while driving by, data that is only accessible on unsecured wifi networks. 

If you wilfully left your personal filing cabinet with bank statements, credit cards and family photos lying in the street outside your house, would you really have the right to complain if someone came along and had a look inside, or worse, stole it and misused it?  

Google made a mistake by not double checking the software loaded onto the cars, when they found out what had happened they apologised, deleted it, and got on with the job. No big deal.  But the same folk who are complaining about the so called privacy invasion are the ones who are turning a blind eye to all those with their wide open (lack of) security and invitation to all and sundry to plunder their internet connection.  Either these folk have no interest in their personal data security or they don't have the skills to enable their router's security. Either way it's Darwinism at work.