As you might remember, Google was harvesting personal data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks, as well as sharing phone and laptop locations. The official statements from Google led us to believe that this data collection was “accidental,” but the FCC reports appear to indicate otherwise.

The engineer at Google who was working on this code told his colleagues about the controversial data collection again and again. He told them that it was designed to collect this personal data, and even a higher-ranking senior manager was in the know, but nothing was done about it until the issue rose to the surface and the public became aware of it. This practice went on for at least three years without us knowing, but they knew. They knew all along.

And for this violation of our privacy, what punishment did Google receive? A mere $25,000 fine, a drop in the bucket for such a huge company. I’m sure that data is worth way more to them.

[Source]

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Uh oh. Big Brother is watching you and his name is Google. Amidst all kinds of other privacy concerns, another one has popped up at the Big G. It seems that the Google Street View cars were not only taking pictures of the streets and buildings; they were also collecting (and sharing) the locations of millions of laptops, PCs, cell phones, and other WiFi-enabled devices.

This goes beyond the sharing of unsecured WiFi networks that they already collected and shared. The cars went around and collected the information of devices connected to these various WiFi access points too. This includes the unique identifiers (MAC addresses) of said devices and the data was made publicly available until only a few weeks ago. They would know where your computer was located, whether it was at a coffee shop, your workplace, or your living room.

I find it unlikely that Google had malicious intents here. It was more likely just some sloppy coding that fell through the cracks, collecting info that they had no intention of collecting, but that doesn’t make the situation any better. I wouldn’t say it’s malicious, just negligent. Thoughts?

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According to Google, this personal data was “picked up accidentally.” Whether you believe the search giant or not is up to you, but they were harvesting emails, passwords, website addresses, and whatever else they could pick up. Well, the search giant has finally agreed to delete said data.

That’s the good news, atleast for all the people whose passwords were floating about in a Google Street View data bank some place. The bad news is, as far as I can tell, this ruling is only applying to the UK for now. I imagine that the deletion process will extend to other areas afflicted with Street View data harvesting in due time though. Luckily the UK wants the data deleted, some governments just want it.

“We will be keeping a close watch on the progress Google makes and will follow up with an extensive audit,” said Information Commissioner Christopher Graham. “I welcome the fact that the wifi payload data that should never have been collected in the first place can, at last, be deleted.”

And here I am, using Google as my primary search engine, while reading through Google Reader and checking my Gmail in my Chrome web browser…

SOURCE: Daily Mail

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Google Street View vehicle pulled over for speeding Photo: Flickr user damianspain

Privacy International claims that data protection law does not usually permit the interception of communications this way.  “This action by Google cannot be blamed on the alleged ‘single engineer’ who wrote the code. It goes to the heart of a systematic failure of management and of duty of care.” said the company.

Jennifer Stoddart, Canada’s privacy commissioner plans to investigate how Google managed to infiltrate people’s networks and what impact it could have on Canadian’s privacy.

Along with Australia and Canada, Google will be handing out the 600 GB of personal data collected in Europe over to the governments of Germany, Spain, and France as stated by Google’s chief executive Eric E. Schmidt.

All of this seems as a rather stark contrast to Google’s mantra of a user’s privacy being one of its top priorities, doing good and not evil, but the issue at hand seems to be one of great importance and it may in fact hold the livelihood and public perception of Google is in dismay.

Source Code Analysis of gstumbler: "The gslite program parses some, though not all, information from 802.11 wireless frames read in from a source of wireless frames. It simultaneously receives geolocation coordinates from a GPS system and then associates each wireless frame with the time and approximate location in which it was received. The gslite program works in concert with a second program, Kismet, which must run simultaneously. Kismet controls one or more wireless cards on a Google vehicle and provides gslite with the stream of detected wireless frames. The relationship between gslite and Kismet is depicted in Figure 2."

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