Lettori fissi

martedì 26 ottobre 2010

Google Snooped Emails & Passwords From Cars

They got away with more than just a view of your street.
Canadian privacy watchdogs last week confirmed that Google had stopped collecting wireless data in its Street View cars. The issue was of much debate as the cars were previously sponges for wireless data.
While Google is no longer tapping into wireless signals, the company admitted that the information collected was more detailed that originally thought. Google wrote in a blog post that it had also collected entire emails, URLs, and even passwords that were flying around the Wi-Fi networks.
Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering & Research at Google wrote:
Finally, I would like to take this opportunity to update one point in my May blog post. When I wrote it, no one inside Google had analyzed in detail the data we had mistakenly collected, so we did not know for sure what the disks contained. Since then a number of external regulators have inspected the data as part of their investigations (seven of which have now been concluded). It’s clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and I would like to apologize again for the fact that we collected it in the first place. We are mortified by what happened, but confident that these changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users.
This admission could have privacy folks even more skeptical of what happens at Google.
"We work hard at Google to earn your trust, and we’re acutely aware that we failed badly here," Eustace said.

12 commenti:

  1. Wirelessly capturing packets is possible by everyone, the fact that Google did this inadvertently means we have someone to poke with a pitchfork for the privacy issue. Good post though. Cheers mate.

    RispondiElimina
  2. oh google, you will be the wal mart of the internet

    RispondiElimina
  3. How is Google even close to at fault here? They were collecting info using wireless that was openly available. People should be more aware how unsafe wireless can be and that they should raise their own security with encryptions and such rather than get mad at someone for accidentally picking up their signals and doing nothing with it.

    RispondiElimina
  4. hahah damn i never thought about it that way^^

    but yeah, thats pretty wild that they did that

    RispondiElimina
  5. Reminds me of that awful movie... "HE'S HACKING MY CAR."

    RispondiElimina
  6. And a lot of people warned about that this could happen, but Google didn't care.

    RispondiElimina
  7. as if they dont have access to MOST OF THE INTERNET ANYWAY

    RispondiElimina
  8. People should encrypt their sensitive data.

    RispondiElimina