Wi-Fi Planet's Eric Griffith today picks up on a report by InfoWorld's Stephen Lawson stating that the ACLU has "turned up the political heat" on San Francisco's plans for citywide Wi-Fi, warning that there isn't enough protection for privacy or free speech in the current plans.

"The ACLU of Northern California said in a letter to the supervisors on Tuesday that both EarthLink's paid service and Google's free offering would fall short of most of the group's recommendations on collection and sharing of personal data and possible tracking of users," Lawson writes. "Among other things, there are no limits on what kind of information EarthLink can or will collect, and terms for the Google service call for requiring 'minimal' information on login without defining 'minimal.'"

In the meantime, Griffith notes that a group called Public Net San Francisco is arguing that San Francisco should drop the Google/EarthLink deal and instead "use the City's existing high speed fiber optic network as the backbone to build a truly modern, fast, and free public communications system."

Tim Pozar of local ISP UnitedLayer contends, "If we go for municipal ownership of a system that makes use of all the City's public assets, including the high-speed ring of fiber optic cable lying only half-used right under our feet, we can get a vastly superior and 10 to 100 times faster system than the clunker being offered to us by EarthLink and Google."

More here from WebProNews, and here from Light Reading.