Google pays tiny cost in wifi scandal

Google is poised to pay a modest $13m (€11.6m) to end a 2010 privacy lawsuit that was once called the biggest US wiretap case ever and threatened the internet giant with billions of dollars in damages.

The settlement would close the books on a scandal that was touched off by trucks used by Google for its Street View mapping project. Cars and trucks scooped up emails, passwords, and other personal information from unencrypted household wifi networks belonging to tens of millions of people all over the world.

The debacle became known as Wi-Spy, and it caused almost as much of an uproar as Facebook’s more recent Cambridge Analytica scandal.

The accord still requires the approval of a San Francisco judge. But under the settlement, proposed late Friday night with no fanfare, the owners of the wifi networks whose information was captured by Google won’t get individual payouts, except for about 20 plaintiffs who filed the complaint as a class action.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs said it would be difficult to identify masses of affected people, a decade later, from the random snippets of data that the company collected when its vehicles drove by their homes.

Instead, what’s left of the $13m — after administrative costs and the lawyers who brought the lawsuit getting a commission of as much as 25% — will be distributed to a handful of consumer privacy advocacy groups, according to a court filing detailing the terms of the deal.

Also, Google will destroy all the data it still possesses and will commit to teaching people how to protect their privacy on the internet. The amount Google is offering is less than one-sixth of the net income its Alphabet parent generates on average in a single day.

That is in line with the relatively small settlements that Google, Facebook, and other internet companies have paid over the last decade to end a variety of lawsuits over alleged privacy violations.

One challenge to larger settlements is the hurdle consumers face to prove they were actually injured and are legally entitled to damages. The Street View lawsuit is one of the few where consumers gained some sort of upper hand.

Bloomberg