If I throw sensitive information into my trash and take it out to the curb, it is perfectly legal for you to dig through my trash, find said information, and take it home with you. It makes no difference how ignorant I may be; I have discarded that information and placed it in a public place.

If you go out and use that information to steal my identity or something, then you’ve broken the law. If you store it in your file cabinet at home, you haven’t. Even if you share it with my enemies, I don’t think you’re breaking any laws. It’s still on me.

Now Germany’s laws might be different, but I haven’t yet seen any information to that effect.

Now, if you’re don’t want to broadcast data for everyone to listen, then you should at least spend 3 minutes to set up a password in your router.
Whoever got data grabbed by Google by broadcasting is probably broadcasting it for months or years, compare that to the ~0.2 seconds worth of data that got recorded by Google, if it got recorded at all (the car must have been driving at the right time and location to grab any piece of data).

“That is exactly what makes our times so oppressive. The system produces a negativity in trompe-l’oeil [a reference to illusion painting], which is integrated into products of the spectacle just as obsolescence is built into industrial products. It is the most efficient way of incorporating all genuine alternatives. There are no longer external Omega points or any antagonistic means available in order to analyze the world; there is nothing more than a fascinated adhesion. One must understand, however, that the more a system nears perfection, the more it approaches the total accident.”

• Jean Baudrillard is author of Simulacra & Simulation (which Hollywood relied upon in their Matrix movie trilogy).

Actually, that depends on where you are. While “grabbing public radio signals” may or may not be a breach of federal wiretap laws in the US, the collection of personal information contained in those signals without the person`s knowledge or consent is CLEARLY against the privacy laws of many countries, including Canada and most (if not all) European nations.

To overuse the house analogy, I’d say this is akin to walking through an unlocked door into someone`s house and taking random pictures. To then say “well I didn’t steal anything or do anything with those pictures” does not excuse the act of taking those pictures or the accompanying violation of privacy.

The problem here isn’t that they received the data, but that they stored it. Not only was it stored, it was stored for more than any short period of time from what we can tell. If I’m in a coffee shop having a conversation with someone, I may not have the right to get upset that you overheard what I was saying (and you’re right, if it is confidential I shouldn’t be saying it in public), but that doesn’t mean that you have the right to record it without me knowing about it.

What we have here is a 3rd party recording information when they are not a party to the “conversation”. Should people be more careful? Of course. Does that excuse Google? No.