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Did A Google Earth Mistake Cause A Couple's Brutal Murder?
Google's Street View trucks reportedly snooped passwords, email addresses
Google's Street View vehicles drive around collecting the images that power the very useful map service, but it turns out they've been collecting a bit more than that. The trucks grab location data from open Wi-Fi networks as they travel, automatically jumping networks five times a second. It turns out that in that 1/5th of a second they spent on each network, Street View vehicles may have gathered a significant quantity of data packets, including some passwords and email addresses.InfoWorld says Google just turned its collected data over to authorities at the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty (CNIL), who discovered the sensitive data amongst all the random packets. France is just the first country to request the data from Google: Spain, Germany, Australia and others have also started investigations. In the U.S., several State Attorney General's offices have begun looking into Google's wifi data collection practices. In response, Google has stopped running its controversial data collection code for the time being, although the company asserts it did nothing illegal.
Comments
8
Subscribe to commentslassiJun 21st 2010 7:09AM
it would have been illegal if I had done it. just touting "do no evil" doesn't change that for google.
stinlen56Jun 21st 2010 7:39AM
This is all such nonsense.
I am not exactly a google fan and I don't use any of their email, calendar, docs, or much other services, but the media makes it seem like google was going around hacking stuff. This information that they "snooped" was freely sent through the air in an unencrypted form. They did not do anything that someone walking by couldn't have done.
I remember some complaints a while ago about google indexing private excel files and the like on networks exposed to the net, but just like wi-fi, their indexing bot can't go any place that any regular user can't go.
leafletteJun 21st 2010 7:53AM
As it is now become useful to many, surely it will comes with a bit of side effects. Just a scary fact that i heard from the folks.
r3loadedJun 21st 2010 9:42AM
I doubt this is illegal, the networks were unencrypted and anyone could have joined them. It's your own fault if you don't secure your network.
XavierJun 21st 2010 11:55AM
"use of an unsecured wireless network may be considered an "unauthorized access of a computer" which is prohibited under Federal law and even theft of communications"
http://www.ibls.com/internet_law_news_portal_view.aspx?s=latestnews&id=1686
...what's their business in collecting data from people networks, anyway?
stinlen56Jun 21st 2010 12:46PM
@Xavier: The sentence before your quote, "Since there have only been a few cases to date, mostly in lower judicial instances, there is no guiding case law on this issue"
fabbazJun 21st 2010 11:10AM
I don't see why this is a bigger fuzz than the original Google-"fail" from a couple of weeks ago. That this is in the news yet again just shows how people don't get that "reading private data" really does mean "reading private data"; or don't know what their private data is. Don't get me wrong, Google made a huge mistake, and I in no way mean to be approving or playing it down: but this is exactly the kind of 0-news (read "zero-news") that keeps our planet stupid. Is someone actually expected to be more outraged by such repitition in different colors?
Again: Google f*cked up bad. Let's hope they did out of stupidity, not out of malevolence. But this is not the point. The point is that people don't understand that if their private data is hijacked, then, yes, indeed their private data is hijacked. Is there anything about this more rocket-sciency that I missed?
If Google accidentally "backupped" all data streams in unsecure networks while cruising around, is it not kind of obvious that they also got any login-data that was entered by people surfing those unsecure networks at that given time?
sinbad09Jun 21st 2010 7:05PM
There seems to be a patten here! this same problem happened in Australia this year http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/privacy-watchdog-probes-googles-wifi-data-harvest-20100519-vckv.html so it begs to asked was it a mistake?