/spandiv style="float:right;width:305px;display:inline;font-size:13px;font-weight:400;font-style:normal;line-height:16px;" img src="http://news.bbcimg.co.uk/media/images/53799000/jpg/_53799338_getty.jpg" width="304" height="228" alt="Street View camera, AFP/Getty"span style="width:304px;"Google's Street View cars took snaps and scooped up data from wi-fi networks/span /div div class="story-feature related narrow"Related Stories/div p class="introduction" id="story_continues_1"Google could be sued for scooping up data from open wi-fi networks after a US court ruling./p pA judge in San Francisco decided that the company's actions may have violated federal laws on wire tapping./p pGoogle had tried to have the class action lawsuit thrown out, claiming that anyone could have intercepted the wireless signals./p pIt had previously admitted collecting the data by mistake while gathering images for its Street View service./p pSince the blunder was revealed, Google has stopped its Street View cars logging wi-fi networks./ppThe problem was discovered in 2010 when German data protection officials asked the company what information its Street View photography cars were collecting. /p pAs well as taking panoramic images, it emerged that they also logged wi-fi networks to help with the search firm's location services./p pThat involved sampling packets of data from wireless hotspots. On open, unencrypted networks the system grabbed logins, passwords and other personal details. About 600MB of data was collected in 30 countries. /p pAt the time, Google apologised for its action, blaming a coding error, and pledged to delete the data./p pThe revelation led to investigations in several countries. France fined Google 100,000 euros (pound;87,000) over the breach./p pIn the US, a class action lawsuit was brought on behalf of plaintiffs from nine states. The case is being heard in California where Google's headquarters is located./p pThe company tried to have the case dismissed on the grounds that the data gathering was inadvertent. It also said that anyone could have intercepted the transmissions./p div style="width:280px;float:right;clear:right;font-size:13px;text-align:right;margin-right:20px;"blockquote style="font-weight:bold;font-size:16px;"p class="first-child"ldquo;the law doesn't clearly cover that issue right now and that the law is really a mess.rdquo;/p/blockquotespan class="quote-credit"Jim Dempsey/span span class="quote-credit-title"Center for Democracy and Technology/span /div p id="story_continues_2"US District Court Judge James Ware disagreed and said that just because a wi-fi network was open did not mean it was meant to be public./p p"Merely pleading that a network is unencrypted does not render that network readily accessible to the general public," Judge Ware wrote in his decision./p pThe fact that Google used some specialist equipment meant it was was liable for prosecution under federal wire tap laws./p pJudge Ware threw out several other elements of the complaint against Google, relating to state laws on wire tapping and unfair competition./p pIn a statement, the company dismissed the claims and said it would consider the latest ruling before deciding whether to launch an appeal./p pUS laws on wire tapping were in need of updating, said Jim Dempsey, a privacy expert at the Center for Democracy amp; Technology./p pThe laws were last updated in the late 1980s to address such things as CB radio and baby monitors, he said./p p"I don't think anyone doubts that it should be illegal to intercept someone's communications," said Mr Dempsey./p p"But I think it's equally clear that the law doesn't clearly cover that issue right now and that the law is really a mess."/ppThis article is from the a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk" title="Link to BBC News"BBC News website/a. © British Broadcasting Corporation, The BBC is not responsible for the content of external internet sites./p pa href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/a4yHnBP0iSckl5dcoA6uIYS7K9Q/0/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/a4yHnBP0iSckl5dcoA6uIYS7K9Q/0/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/abr/ a href="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/a4yHnBP0iSckl5dcoA6uIYS7K9Q/1/da"img src="http://feedads.g.doubleclick.net/~a/a4yHnBP0iSckl5dcoA6uIYS7K9Q/1/di" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/BbcNewsTechnologyFullFeed/~4/-VkqwOPkcB0" height="1" width="1"/