Why are people worried about the NSA when we know that Google was cracking wifi while doing drive bys?

Google cannot use a broad definition of “radio communication” to escape claims that its Street View cars violated federal privacy laws, the 9th Circuit ruled Tuesday.

Street View cars, which travel the world taking photographs and capturing data for Google, inadvertently collected some 600 gigabytes of private data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks in more than 30 countries. The company collected the data, which included “personal emails, usernames, passwords, videos, and documents,” between 2007 and 2010, after which it purportedly corrected the issue, the court noted.

Upon admitting the mistake, however, Google faced a number of potential class actions. The complaints were eventually consolidated in California, where lead plaintiff Benjamin Joffe and others sought to certify a class of “all persons whose electronic communications were intercepted by Google Street View vehicles since May 25, 2007.”

The plaintiffs claimed that Google had violated various points of the federal Wiretap Act, which prohibits the interception of “wire, oral, or electronic communication,” except in a few instances. The law provides an exemption for “electronic communication made through an electronic communication system” that is “readily accessible to the general public.” Unscrambled radio and television broadcasts fall under this exemption.

In a motion to dismiss the proposed class action, Google had argued that all data transmitted over any Wi-Fi network is an electronic “radio communication,” and thus exempt, just as any other radio broadcast, from the prohibition on interception the same. It supported this argument by defining radio communication as “any information transmitted using radio wave.” Google also justified the interception of unencrypted WiFi networks because they are “readily accessible to the general public.”

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