Published June 23, 2010

A Google Street View vehicle in Copenhagen (Christian Johannesen/Flickr)

Massachusetts has joined the legal fray in the ongoing case of Google v. Privacy, this time with regard to those Street View cameras that capture the burning house, the kissing teenagers and, apparently, your e-mail password and other private information. Google admitted to “accidentally” capturing a lot more data than intended.

Attorney General Martha Coakley recently joined with 30 states in investigating the breach, and a Massachusetts company called Galaxy Internet Services is filing a class-action suit.

EPIC, the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center, has been on the case from Day 1, having aggregated an unbelievable amount of research on Street View in 30 countries. I talked to privacy activist Marc Rotenberg, the Boston-born executive director of EPIC, about the case.

Was this really “accidental?”

“It’s a difficult question to answer, because a large part of the data collection was clearly purposeful. Google said yes, we intended to collect all the Wi-Fi information. … We weren’t intending to tell anyone. … And along the way, we may have collected more information than we needed. There’s no way you ‘accidentally’ record this kind of data in 30 countries.”

Rotenberg believes Google deliberately misled investigators about the range and amount of private data it collected.

But people left their Wi-Fi routers unencrypted — the data was there for the taking, right?

“In terms of the laws of physics, that’s correct,” Rotenberg said. “People can do that. Just like people can break into your house if they want to, because locks are not impregnable.”

In other words, it’s still illegal, he said. Rotenberg believes Google broke federal wiretapping laws. The company not only intercepted wireless data packets but stored them on hard drives.

“There’s no question that the largest search company in the world, that has pinpoint addresses and mapping functions and detailed personal information, would be able to associate you with a device … which makes the device information personally identifiable.

“From Google’s perspective, there’s no doubt that more information is better. A lot of the privacy battles have been about whether they’ve gone too far.”

A classic case of security versus convenience, I concluded, almost as an aside.

Rotenberg fired back: “I don’t believe in trade-offs. We deserve convenience and security. That’s what these laws are for.” Otherwise, he said, “we’d all have to have lead walls.”