Google Capitulates To Demands for Street View Data
In addition, company CEO Eric Schmidt told the Financial Times this week that an engineer who inserted software into the Street View vehicles' programs -- code that captured the unauthorized information -- is now the subject of an internal company investigation.
Seven Class-Action Suits
At least seven class-action lawsuits have been filed or are being planned in the U.S. in which the plaintiffs contend Google violated federal wiretapping laws. There are also criminal and other government investigations in Germany, Ireland, Italy, France, Spain and others, and the U.S. Federal Trade Commission has been asked by members of Congress to see if laws were broken.
The Street View controversy stems from the collection of private wireless data from Google vehicles, which have ridden down streets worldwide to collect photos for use in the company's Street View application within Google Maps. Google said about 600GB of data was mistakenly collected in 30 countries.
According to Senior Vice President of Engineering and Research Alan Eustace, the company has acknowledged it collected SSID information from wireless routers. That information contains Wi-Fi network names and MAC addresses, which are the unique numbers given to Wi-Fi routers. At first, Google said it didn't collect "payload data," or the private information sent over networks.
But Eustace later noted that "we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks." The payload data includes fragments of web sites, e-mails and possibly personal banking data. Eustace added that the data has never been used in Google products, and only fragments were collected because the vehicles were...
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