Street View cars collected private data, and Google gets fined… again
Google’s Street View project is the best thing that happened to navigation since the invention of the global positioning system satellite constellation. No other company has reached as far as Google in recording the actual look of roads and the houses lining them, from remote places in Nepal to your home street.
Those cars, however, have been collecting not only funny situations on the road, faces or license plates that had to be censored afterwards but your home Wi-fi, emails and passwords as well. Upon realization of the practice that Google called a mistake, it still agreed to settle the matter for $7 million in 2013, for data collected in the 2007-2010 period. At the time, Google agreed to delete the collected data and set up tutorials for people to secure their home Wi-fi in the process.
It is very strange that six years after Google agreed to end this practice and made public service announcements, it’s once again agreeing to do what others had assumed they already had
While Google again denies any wrongdoing, it remains to be heard why exactly the Wi-fi data collection issue resurfaced with new settlement details. Street View – great. Trawling for private wireless network info – weak sauce.