http://brianshall.com/content/poll-were-you-looking-porn-when-googles-street-view-van-drove-past-your-house

On what evidence do you base the claim, “…governments have absolutely no interest in snooping the private data…”?

Destroy it and everybody calls it a day. If the German people are smart, of course. But we know better don’t we?

I don’t believe Google will give out incriminating evidence in the form of this WIFI packets. They will do everything they can to bury this. Therefor, I am fine with Google telling me that the data has been wiped.

Here’s how this is going to play out: Google is NOT going to turn over the data in Germany (they can’t, because the data will show that they were vacuuming up payload data intentionally, that they knew they were doing it, and that they had been doing it since 2006).

Instead, they will try and get all of their many surrogates and front groups (Harvard Berkman Center, Stanford, EFF, Global Network Initiative, John Palfrey, Jonathan Zittrain, and the rest of Google’s apologists and flacks) to spin this ridiculous notion that turning over the private data that Google stole to “big, bad governments” is far more dangerous than Google’s hoovering up the data in the first place.

Never mind that these governments have absolutely no interest in snooping the private data, but rather doing a forensic analysis to find out what Google knew and when they knew it.

That’s what the company is terrified of because it will completely destroy the trust consumers have placed in the company. If they were knowingly sucking up payload data from open wifi connections (maybe not illegally, but certainly unethically), what else are they doing with all of the data we willingly hand over to them?

Then we are in 1984.