David Kravets reports:
A federal judge sided with Google on Monday, granting the search giant the right to appeal his ruling that packet-sniffing on non-password-protected Wi-Fi networks is illegal wiretapping.
The decision by U.S. District Judge James Ware tentatively sets aside his June 29 ruling in nearly a dozen combined lawsuits seeking damages from Google for eavesdropping on open, unencrypted Wi-Fi networks from its Street View mapping cars. The vehicles, which rolled through neighborhoods across the country, were equipped with Wi-Fi–sniffing hardware to record the names and MAC addresses of routers to improve Google location-specific services. But the cars also secretly gathered snippets of Americans’ data.
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