In the official blog post, Google, recently admitted that they had indeed been collecting Wifi information picked up by their Street View cars.
How did the WiFi information get picked up? Through the Google Street View project. This is a technology featured in Google Maps and Google Earth. It provides views and pictures from locations along many streets in the world. Launched in May 2007, it was originally implemented in a few cities in the United States, but now the project has ventured into foreign countries.
Now then, the Google Street View displays images taken from a fleet of specially designed cars. Each of these cars has nine directional cameras for 360° views with a height of nearly 2.5 meters. There are GPS units for gathering positioning information, and three laser range scanners to measure spots and location nearly 50 meters and 180° in front of the vehicle.
So what happened? Here is Google’s response.
“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.
As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and are currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it. ”
While many people would like to castigate Google for this intrusion of privacy, two things should be noted. One is that they did come forward, offer an explanation and make an apology for the mishap. The second is that while the Street view cars were traveling, they were more interested in picking up “network data like SSID information and MAC addresses.” They were not interested in picking up payload data. And if you think of it, they couldn’t have gotten much since they were only passing through the locations, staying there only a few seconds at a time.
In any event, Google is no longer collecting this information. It also looks like what they did have has been erased or destroyed.
Source: Google
