Google Street View Team Accidentally Catches Wi-Fi Data

While many people love the free services that Google offers to the public, there are many folks out there who are concerned about the amount of personal data that Google manages to accumulate. A recent incident has surfaced; possibly highlighting that even Google can mess up from time to time. The issue we’re talking about is that Google’s Street View cars using panoramic cameras over the last few years managed to capture information such as SSIDs and MAC addresses that indentified networks, but also fragments of the actual data itself. While these little bits and pieces didn’t include any data passed over secure password protected networks or any whole data, it’s still something you can be sure users wouldn’t like. Apparently this is due to some code developed by an engineer to scrape traffic off networks, and was accidentally included, though Google claims to have no intention of using such data. In response to this, Google has grounded its Street View cars and are planning to sort all this mess out. An apology from Google reads:

“The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust—and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. We are profoundly sorry for this error and are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.”

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