A few months ago, Google admitted that it had accidently picked up personal information from wireless accounts as their StreetView cars roamed around Britain’s neighborhood’s.
The StreetView cars are Google’s way of collecting information about cities, streets, neighborhood, and the like, They feed the information into their servers and becomes part of their Google Map.
So far so good, but as they were pursuing their quest, they are picking up information about users. One question is “Why?” What can they hope to obtain? The street view picks up information at the street level. The detail afforded by this helpful to users who are traveling. They record pictures, take videos,and apparently also pick up WiFi signals. This last part is what got them in trouble.
The signals they picked up were either encrypted or unencrypted. They threw the encrypted ones away but kept the unencrypted ones.
The UK’s Information Commissioner Office (ICO)
As the story broke last spring, Google went into an “I’m sorry” mode. “I didn’t mean to do it.” Subsequently they deleted the information that they picked up. The explanation given originally was that there was a technical setting that should have been turned off, but was unintentionally left on. It was this mistake that caused the data pickup. That must have convinced the ICO. Here is what they reported to the press:
“As we have only seen samples of the records collected in the UK we recognize that other data protection authorities conducting a detailed analysis of all the payload data collected in their jurisdictions may nevertheless find samples of information which can be linked to identifiable individuals. However, on the basis of the samples we saw we are satisfied so far that it is unlikely that Google will have captured significant amounts of personal data. “ A follow up by ICO added that it had not seen any evidence there was a compromise of personal information; the data captured by Google did not cause or could cause any harm to individuals.
Source: Google
