Googlegate: Mapping a scandal of global proportions

Opinion While the rest of us have generally been enjoying the sunshine and warm weather for the past few weeks, there has been a permanent cloud over Mountain View, as the storm over Google's capturing of Wi-Fi content with its Street View cars has developed.

That storm now threatens significant reputational damage to Google, not least because dozens of countries are considering initiating criminal prosecutions against it and indeed a number of police investigations have already begun.

On April 22nd 2010, news broke that Google's Street View cars had been surreptitiously collecting Media Access Control (MAC) addresses and Service Set Identifiers (SSID) from Wi-Fi networks as they roamed the planet taking photographs of our houses.

Street View has been contentious enough from a privacy perspective, with many people concerned about the dangers such activity presents, and has been in the headlines frequently. But once it was discovered that Google was capturing Wi-Fi identifiers as well, the controversy snowballed.

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