Google tells Supreme Court it's legal to packet sniff open Wi-Fi networks

Google wants the Supreme Court to reverse a decision concluding that the media giant could be held liable for hijacking data on unencrypted Wi-Fi routers via its Street View cars.

The legal flap should concern anybody who uses open Wi-Fi connections in public places like coffee houses and restaurants. That’s because Google claims it is not illegal to intercept data from Wi-Fi signals that are not password protected.

Google’s Street View vehicles, which are mapping the globe, were housing Wi-Fi sniffing hardware that was gathering data on the MAC addresses of routers in neighborhoods to better Google's location services. But Google was also pulling snippets of data from unprotected Wi-Fi networks, and it claimed it did not know it was sniffing packets.