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Google Admits Mistake with Street View Wi-Fi Network Snooping Cars

Posted: 15th May, 2010 By: MarkJ
internet wifi securityInternet Search Engine and advertising giant Google has admitted that using their Street View cars to map peoples home Wi-Fi wireless networks "was a mistake". The controversial practice was discovered in April by a "horrified" German Federal Data Protection Commissioner, Peter Schaar (here).

Google's Street View cars typically take pictures of every road they go down and present it on their website as part of an interactive and often quite useful navigation service. But many people are concerned that Google could easily cross reference all the data it gathers from other sources and potentially know more about YOU than even a government might.

At the time Google claimed that using scanners to map wireless (WLAN) networks and record their unique Media Access Control (mac) addresses was "by its very nature publicly broadcast and collecting it for geolocation purposes is not new or unique to Google". Indeed many other organisations do exactly that, although none have the ability to cross reference so much data about an individual.

Now it turns out that Google got its statement wrong and in quite a big way. The search giant has in fact admitted that its Street View cars did, supposedly by accident, gather a lot more than mere mac address data.

Google's Alan Eustace, Senior VP of Engineering & Research, admitted:

"We said that while Google did collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) using Street View cars, we did not collect payload data (information sent over the network). But it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products."

The news is likely to send shivers down the spine of any passing privacy protection campaigners who might be reading. However Google claims that they only collected "fragments" of the data and from open (not secured) Wi-Fi networks. In addition the collected information was allegedly never used.

Alan Eustace continued:

"So how did this happen? 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."

Did you try the DELETE key at all Google? Yes, it's the key on the right side of your Keyboard there and, shockingly we will admit, does not require state intervention for its use :glee: . A secure erase after that should do the trick, failing that.. try a hammer and some powerful magnets.

Comical musings aside. Google has admitted that it "fell short" when trying to maintain people's trust. The internet giant has since said that its software will now be subjected to a third party review and all WiFi data collecting activity has been stopped. Well at least they came clean about it.
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