InfoWatch analytic center reports, it appears that Google maybe too smart for their own good as they have admitted that their Street View cars have been accessing information that they had no right collecting.
For the last three years, Google has been acquiring data pertaining to people’s wi-fi activity, private information that is none of their business.
Google is now in the process of contacting countries who they have wrongfully stolen personal info from, to inform them of the situation and to assure them that all info will be destroyed. “It’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks,” Google Senior VP of Engineering and Research Alan Eustace said in a post on Google’s official blog on Friday.
Germany’s consumer protection minister wasted little time in bad mouthing Google, and it appears that this time, people have a reason to be upset with the Big G.
“According to the information available to us so far, Google has for years penetrated private networks, apparently illegally,” her office said in a statement.
“The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust - and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here,” wrote Eustace.
“The idea is fascinating – a 3-dimensional presentation of streets and houses and a close to reality experience for the users of Google’s service Street View. But, what about the rights of people and house owners in those views? The fact that Google has in parallel gathered information about ‘open’ accessible networks raises the eyebrows – why do they need this data? Information gathering for the sake of abundant data availability has never been supported by western data protection laws and should never happen,” comments Michael Struss, Sales Director at InfoWatch Central Europe, one of the leading companies specializing on the protection of private and confidential data.
