Google Street View Cars Collecting Wifi Data even Passwords

[challapradyumna]

Google has been using their Street view cars for taking photos of all the places it pass by but it was also collecting data from unencrypted wifi networks . The data they collected consisted of names, phone numbers, mailing addresses, IP addresses, entire email messages, cookies, chat sessions, search terms, medical information, passwords, snippets of video and audio files, and log-ins to dating networks , well pretty much everything .

They initially denied that they even tried to collect information this was way back in april 2010

we do not collect any information about householders, we cannot identify an individual from the location data Google collects via its Street View cars....We do not believe it is illegal -- this is all publicly broadcast information which is accessible to anyone with a Wi-Fi-enabled device.

In may 2010 they said

it's now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.... So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental Wi-Fi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast Wi-Fi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic Wi-Fi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google's Street View cars, they included that code in their software -- although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.

In October they admitted that they even got hold of email & passwords i

n some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords

In the recent FCC report

Engineer Doe intended to collect, store, and analyze payload data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. ... In a discussion of "Privacy Considerations," the design document states, "A typical concern might be that we are logging user traffic along with sufficient data to precisely triangulate their position at a given time, along with information about what they were doing."

For more than two years, Google’s Street View cars collected names, addresses, telephone numbers, URLs, passwords, email, text messages, medical records, video and audio files, and other information from internet users in the US

The record also shows that Google’s supervision of the wi-fi data collection project was minimal . . . indeed, it appears that no one at the company carefully reviewed the software code or the design document.’

Earlier this month Google was fined £15,000 by the FCC after it found the company ‘wilfully and repeatedly’ violated orders to hand over information it requested while investigating Street View.

In Germany it was forced to stop filming for Street View due to privacy concerns, and in France it was fined £87,000 by the privacy regulator CNIL.