The collection of images and data for Google’s Street View feature has brought up lots of interesting issues of privacy with internet speed. They capture a lot of odd things when they’re out photographing neighborhoods, like a romantic moment between two teens, images of people going into adult book stores, feeding meters in front of strip clubs, and probably lots of other embarrassing things. Residents of one neighborhood in the UK actually blocked a Google Street View car from continuing through their town a year ago.Â
Recently, Google admitted that while driving around collecting data about public Wi-Fi networks, they accidentally collected a lot of other unencrypted data too. They came clean about it, and said that the information hasn’t been looked at or used, but people are freaking out. People like the U.S. Government. According to Yahoo news:
Google said that any personal information inadvertently swept up in the process of mapping Wi-Fi networks was “not used to identify any specific individual or household” and was stored only in “raw, aggregate, binary form.” It added that “the payload data has never been used in any Google product or service, nor do we intend to use it.”
The company also said it is aware of only two Google engineers who have even seen the data: the engineer who designed the software used to process information about the Wi-Fi networks being mapped, and the engineer who tested the data that had been collected after the company learned of the problem.
For now, Google is retaining the data collected in the United States to comply with a court order stemming from pending civil litigation. The company has deleted data that came from Ireland, Denmark and Austria at the request of authorities in those countries.
Tags: Google, Internet Speed, Wi-Fi