Car named Street View

Google>> Breach Of Privacy • Virtual world

Google admitted it wrongly gathered data from unprotected wi-fi networks over the past three years. The issue came to light after German authorities asked to audit data taken by Street View cars, engines that gather data for Google maps. Google conducted an internal review and found the cars were “mistakenly collecting samples of data from open networks”.

In a blogpost Google said it has grounded the cars from collecting wi-fi information. Alan Eustace, senior vice president of engineering and research, said in 2006 “an engineer working on an experimental wi-fi project wrote a code sampling all categories of publicly broadcast wi-fi data.” The code was included in the Street View cars’ software and “quite simply, it was a mistake,” he added.