Google's privacy snafu prompts lawsuit

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The incident, which the company claims to have been unintentional, has prompted the ire of governments and privacy groups around the world.

Last Friday the Google said it is currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries, which include the United States, Germany, France, Brazil and Hong Kong in China, about how to dispose of the data, which Google said it never used.

"It's now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (not-password-protected) WiFi networks," Google Senior VP of Engineering and Research Alan Eustace said in a post on Google's official blog last week.

The two plaintiffs, Vicki Van Valin of Oregon and Neil Mertz of Washington, said that their homes' wireless networks were infact not password protected, and that Street View vehicles had cruised by their residences at least once.

"Van Valin works in a high technology field, and works from her home over her Internet-connected computer a substantial amount of time," the complaint read.

"In connection with her work and home life, Van Valin transmits and receives a substantial amount of data from and to her computer over her wireless network. A significant amount of the wireless data is also subject to her employer's non-disclosure and security regulations."

The pair also claimed to have sent credit card and banking data over their networks.

The lawsuit seeks class-action status, which would open the case to a pool of plaintiffs potentially in the millions.

Marcia Hofmann, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the fact that Google collected the data by accident would probably protect the company from liability under the federal wiretap law, which prohibits unauthorized access of communications.

"To violate the law requires that the interception was intentional," said Hofmann.

But she noted that she did not know how Google might fare under laws in other countries and said she thought it was possible that some countries might step up regulatory scrutiny of Google's privacy practices in the wake of the incident