Google Wi-Fi plans for San Francisco raises privacy issues

Google Wi-Fi plans for San Francisco raises privacy issues

Google and EarthLink have just won a contract to establish a Wi-Fi network in the San Francisco city to provide free wireless internet connectivity to the people living in the city.

However, this news has raised certain privacy issues. The privacy groups in the country are worried that this would allow the government bodies monitoring how and where users surf the Web.

The search engine giant is going to finance this service though advertising and plans to track users’ locations and use that data to show related and relevant ads to the user surfing though this service.

Google has further said that they would be storing this information for as many as 180 days before starting afresh with that particular user. Kurt Opsahl, staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog group said in a statement: “The greatest concern is that once you have that treasure trove of information, will people start to come looking for it?”

Google has not released any statement on these raised issues. Though, the recent cause of US DoJ asking the company to reveal search engine queries on Google.com has confirmed that the government is interested in gaining information through ISPs and web services about user activities on the internet.