In 2010, Google was busted using their Google Street View cars to collect Wi-Fi data from areas they passed through. The company claimed that the effort was a rogue action of one employee running a test project, and the data collected was largely useless (confirmed by subsequent studies) given the collection vehicles flipped channels roughly five times each second. Google admitted the mistake, put new employee measures in place, and that probably should have been the end of it.

Instead, what we saw was a fit of global hysteria over Google's actions well out of scale with what actually happened -- especially in context of the privacy abuses we see nearly every day from companies and governments. Numerous lawsuits from more than a dozen countries were filed, recently resulting in a $7 million dollar wrist slap for the company.

This week the EFF (via Techdirt) looked at some of the negative repercussions the settlement has had on open Wi-Fi, given many of the requirements layered on Google required they "educate" users about locking up all hotspots. The EFF argues this misses the point, and acts to erode a valuable public resource:In short, open Wi-Fi hotspots by themselves are not necessarily a bad thing, but they're treated as such by politicians who all-too-frequently don't understand the technology they're legislating. Meanwhile, you have a public that in some corners was bent out of shape about Google accidentally collecting useless data, but oblivious or apathetic to the fact that nearly all of their online behaviors are monitored, monetized and sold to and by a wide variety of companies and governments with little to no oversight or consumer protections.