Google Maps has just been implicated in a divorce, its Street View having captured an image of a woman undeniably cheating on her husband. In the past we have written about various Google Maps oopsies, including it causing the wrong house to be demolished, and Google Street View capturing the image of a woman urinating in public. But to the best of our knowledge, this is the first time that Google Maps has led to divorce.

Google is going beyond Google Street View and rolling out the backpack cam operated Google Street View Trekker, a wilderness cam that offers a wilderness view of all the corners of the world that Google Street View has previously left untouched, namely woods views and forest views. The backpack cams can be carried by hikers and campers who are on foot and already headed to spots where cars and planes cannot easily go and Google is starting with the Grand Canyon.

A recent report from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), following a 17-month investigation, reveals that, contrary to what Google’s position had been all this time, Google actually knew that their Street View drive-bys were sucking down people’s personal data through any open wifi routers that the Street View van encountered. And not just a little bit – but for nearly three years, between 2007 and 2010. Private data that was harvested from individuals includes email (the full text of!), passwords, sites visited, and other sensitive information. Until now Google had always maintained that they didn’t realize it was happening, and that it was an accident wraught by a single engineer at Google. Turns out that supervisors knew all along that it was going on. While the FCC concludes that Google did not break any laws, there was a heck of a lot of invasion of privacy going on, and, in addition, Google was slapped with a $25,000 fine for obstructing the investigation.

The Google Streetview lawsuit filed by Aaron and Christine Boring, claiming invasion of privacy because the Google Street View van snapped pictures after going down their posted, private road, has been dismissed by the Court.

Does Google’s StreetView invade privacy and encroach upon civil liberties? There are those who say that it does, and into this group we would have to place the Pennsylvania couple, Aaron and Christine Boring, who are suing the search company for both intentional and/or grossly reckless invasion of privacy and mental distress. They seek a minimum of $25,000.

Those Google slippy maps (the term for maps that you can pull around and zoom in or out on) are the result of far more effort than you may realize. The Google street view vans (and backpacks) are only a small part of what goes into the Google mapping project Ground Truth. (A list of countries mapped by Google Ground Truth is below.)

Google Street View is back for iOS 6 users. It seems that Google is the knight in shining armor to the whole Mapplegate fiasco that has left scores of iOS 6 users frustrated with the quality of Apple maps. The victory is small, but at this point, iOS 6 users will take any scrap thrown their way.

Google has found themselves in hot water over privacy issues yet again. As we previously reported, it was discovered that the Google Street View vehicles were collecting data illegally, while taking street pictures in the US, Australia and Europe. In fact, they were doing it for three years, between 2007 and 2010, by harvesting personal data through open wifi routers as the Street View car drove by. This data included entire emails, site visit history, passwords, and other private information that the average citizen probably does not want floating around.

Google Maps is perhaps one of the most useful services which Google has rolled out; people have used Google Maps as the basis for all sorts of cool and interesting things. One such use is History Pin, a service through which people can upload photos from days of yore and ‘pin’ them onto a Google map of the region, indexed by the represented date. But the really cool thing about HistoryPin is that you can see the photo in context, inserted into the moden day street view.

Google Maps has now mapped the Ruins of Pompeii – complete with street view! Now, without leaving your chair, you can experience (ok, nearly) what it’s like to walk around the Ruins of Pompeii!

A Dutch boy who was mugged and robbed last year by a pair of 24-year-old twin robbers just happened to find an image of the moment before the mugging occurred, in the Google Street View on Google Earth.

Google’s controversial Street View feature – often accused of invading privacy – is back in the news again. A few weeks ago, the Google StreetView van caught a woman in Madrid, Spain squatting behind a parked car and, well, relieving herself. Yes, Google published an image of a woman urinating. Here it is.

The Internet is all abuzz today with a line from Google’s response in the invasion of privacy lawsuit filed against Google by Aaron Boring and Christine Boring of Pennsylvania. That line is “Complete privacy does not exist.” There’s only one problem – Google didn’t actually say it.

Google has responded to privacy concerns about people being recognized from Google StreetView map images, and begun deploying new face blurring technology to mask their identity. So those blurred faces you see aren’t an accident, or the result of the subjects having drunk too much the night before.