Now it’s Google’s turn!!! Google wrongly collected information people have sent over unencrypted wi-fi networks
Google admitted that it have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks. The issue came to light after German authorities asked to audit the data the company’s Street View cars gathered as they took photos viewed on Google maps.
Google said during a review it found it had “been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open networks”.
The admission will increase concerns about potential privacy breaches. So after Facebook now Google has done something that is related to our privacy. Google admitted in their official blog that while Google did collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) using Street View cars, we did not collect payload data (information sent over the network). But it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.
This happened due to a piece of code written by an engineer in 2006 for a Wi-Fi experimental project that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars.
So it’s again a breach in privacy of the people and according to Google “We work hard to earn your trust—and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here”. Now they want to delete this data ASAP, and they are reaching out to the regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it. So maintaining the people’s trust they are asking a third party to review the software at issue, how it worked and what data it gathered, as well as to confirm that they deleted the data appropriately; and Internally reviewing their procedures to ensure that our controls are sufficiently robust to address these kinds of problems in the future.
For the Google Official blog click here
For older post on Facebook privacy issue click here
7 Comments to “Now it’s Google’s turn!!! Google wrongly collected information people have sent over unencrypted wi-fi networks”
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[...] our earlier post we wrote about Google’s Street View cars mistakenly collecting data from unprotected wi-fi connection, now Mr. Eric Schmidt said “Who was harmed? Name the person” in the Google’s annual [...]
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