Google's mistake leads to a lot of collected Wi-Fi payload data via Street View

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/btl/googles-mistake-leads-to-a-lot-of-collected-wi-fi-payload-data-via-street-view/34471?tag=nl.e539
By Larry Dignan | May 14, 2010, 2:31pm PDT
Summary: A mistake by an engineer caused Google to inadvertently collect Wi-Fi payload data via its Street View cars. An audit turned up the problem.

Google said Friday that an audit showed that it was collecting Wi-Fi data, including sites consumers visited, from its Street View cars that compile data for Google Maps and other services.

In a blog post, Google said that the data protection authority (DPA) in Hamburg, Germany asked for the audit. Since the request, Google looked at all the data it was collecting. Google initially said that it collected public SSID data and MAC addresses but didn’t grab information sent over a network. However, Google realized it was collecting payload data even though it never used it in a product.
Usually, Google only got fragments of payload data—sites you visit and other items—because Street View cars were on the move.
Add it up and it’s a big mistake:

In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental Wi-Fi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast Wi-Fi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic Wi-Fi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.
As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and are currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it.

2010年5月18日 星期二 05:10 【明報專訊】
互聯網巨擘Google在香港等9個國際城市，採用攝影車拍攝街景時，蒐集並保存了部分市民透過無線網絡（Wi-Fi）傳送的數據，例 如電郵內容。個人資料私隱專員吳斌昨向「Google香港」展開循規審查，提出連串問題，並要求Google代表今日到公署與他會面。吳斌表示，今次事件屬國際性，他已聯絡多個有緊密聯繫的海外私隱機構，尋求共同國際力量，調查及制裁Google。他認為，事件暴露了沒有密碼保護的Wi-Fi網絡非常公開，市民使用Wi-Fi時如不加密，個人資料隨時會被取用。吳斌批評，Google沒有告知市民，其車除了拍攝街景外，還會收集其他資料。對於Google解釋「不知道」過去3年一直收集涉及普羅大眾私隱的 數據，吳斌認為不可接受，並對Google破壞公眾的信任感到震驚，認為Google必須盡快檢討業務上的私隱政策，保證類似違規事件不再發生。