Google Spied on Your Internet Activity But It Was an Innocent Mistake

Tweet

Google is slowly but surely taken over the world. First it’s the Internet then everything else. That’s how a good conspiracy theory should start in the first place. In real life however, Google might not be able to rule the Universe as we know it alone since there are other large companies out there fighting for the same spot.

But Gogole is definitely on the right track and a recent official Google blog post / extensive appology proves it.

What’s the matter you ask? Well, you know those Street View cars that make possible that amazing and totally original Street View view in Google Maps? It looks like those cars were taking a lot more than simple pictures. In fact the company was collecting data about the wireless networks found while on roaming the streets of the USA and then the world.

Google openly admits that these cars have been collecting “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.” Like that’s not enough these cars have also “been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks. But, of course, they “never used that data in any Google products.”

That sounds pretty bad in my book, even if I am well aware that Google’s “mistake” wouldn’t have been possible in the first place if people would secure their Wi-Fi networks first. No, I am not defending Google here since I am not surprised either that they were doing this. I’ll be surprised if Google will still claim this all happened by mistake. Are such mistakes permitted in a well-oiled complex machinery like Google? Apparently they are:

So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code 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, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.

Since when leaders aren’t listened to anymore?

It all came out in Germany where the data protection authority in Hamburg asked to audit the Wi-Fi data on those Street View cars. That lead Google to reexamine its Street View cars, ground them and seal off the data which will be disposed off shortly while the software in question will also be controlled in order for such thing not to happen anymore. In all fairness I’ll also add that they probably haven’t been able to really collect relevant data about your Internet usage, but then again it’s still a breach of privacy here!

But let’s hear it from our readers; how do you feel about Google’s apology, found at the via link below?