Did A Google Earth Mistake Cause A Couple's Brutal Murder?
Critics Tear Down AT&T Claim About Cell Phones
Google finally admits Street View vehicles collected passwords, promises privacy fixes
Google has admitted that its Street View cars have collected entire passwords and emails while mapping the world and collecting information about open Wi-Fi hotspots on their way. Google's Senior VP of Engineering and Research, Alan Eustace, mentioned this today in a blog post dedicated to how Google plans to deal with privacy controls inside the company.Google has been accused by many governments of having collected personal data with their Street View vehicles, but was subsequently cleared of any wrongdoing by a UK regulatory body.
At first, Google did not know what types of data it had inadvertently collected, but prompted by the many governments' investigations into this matter, deep analysis of the packets revealed that there were some instances where full emails, URLs and even passwords were captured. Google apologized for this yet again and Alan Eustace said that they would like to delete all the data as soon as possible.
In order for such things never to happen again, Google has a plan to create stronger privacy controls inside the company. To help achieve this, they've hired Alma Whitten as director of privacy across both engineering and product management. Her role will be to ensure that effective privacy controls are built into all Google products and internal practices. Google employees will also undergo privacy training and every lead engineer inside the company will be required to maintain a privacy design document for each project they're working on.
Google certainly hopes that these measures all but guarantee there will be no more privacy debacles involving the company, and for our data's sake, we do too.
Comments
9
Subscribe to commentsRogueJedi86Oct 22nd 2010 5:24PM
Wait what? What does their street view have to do with passwords and accounts? Are people holding up giant signs of their passwords when the Streetview Car goes by?
DrakkenfyreOct 22nd 2010 7:37PM
They were running wifi collection sofware as they drove. Any unsecured wifi spot it connected to and collected data.
altar3020Oct 22nd 2010 5:28PM
If Google is just taking pictures, what is it doing with equipment that collects computer info. All they need is a camera. Accident? Something smells in Denmark.
ProlornOct 22nd 2010 9:23PM
The cars mapped open wifi access points to GPS data, so that you could use wifi to supplement GPS for location-based services. Google later on discovered that the tool they had been using to catalogue wifi points had also been storing whatever packets of data happened to through them.
This was SERIOUSLY OVERBLOWN by the mainstream media, and by people with no idea how technology works. If Google was out to gather your data (beyond the norm), they have much better ways to do so (and presumably they'd take pains to avoid revealing they were doing so).
ryokeaOct 22nd 2010 6:03PM
It stated in the article that the cars were mapping out open wifi points, meaning they were running a tool similar to Netstumbler or Kismet and gathering data about open wifi points to map signal strength and detect rough positioning using GPS and data received on signal connection.
This is your standard wardriving setup. Entirely feasible that you could nab some info from the captured wifi packets that had sensitive data.
TscharliOct 22nd 2010 6:43PM
+++telegram+++telegram+++telegram+++
to:google
from:j.stalin
text: congrats+++couldn't have done better+++
eof
Vlad BobleantaOct 22nd 2010 7:05PM
Indeed, the reason they snooped on data is that they were mapping Wi-Fi SSIDs. This helps locate you "via wireless networks" and its accuracy is astounding if you've ever tried it. WLAN positioning basically relies on the fact that someone indexed all the SSIDs in an area. Your location is then calculated based on the signal strength of the SSIDs around you. If this is also matched up against aGPS data (mobile network positioning) the accuracy gets even better. This is what happens when you only tick "Use wireless networks" in location settings on an Android device.
So while they were mapping SSIDs (and taking pictures of the streets), they inadvertently stored packets that were flowing through open wireless networks. This is easily done by anyone, and is one of the many reasons you should never leave your Wi-Fi network unsecured.
Those packets contained the sensitive data. I hope all is clear(er) now. Thanks for reading.
deansideOct 23rd 2010 12:11PM
this may explain why my wifi was infiltrated by squatters without my password???
NOTFAKEBARRYOct 25th 2010 9:43AM
No, no it wouldn't.