Google is on the back foot after Alan Eustace, the company's senior vice president for engineering and research, admitted in a company blog post that Google had been been collecting data from Wi-Fi networks through its Google Maps Street View Cars. In other words, Google vans have been driving around collecting data about websites people were visiting over wireless networks. Eustace admits the company screwed up. "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."
The company claims the payload data collection was an accident. What happened, it says, is that a piece of code had mistakenly been used in the software used in the Street View Cars, but Google claims there were no plans to collect or use such data.
It's hard to believe Google is being completely truthful. Why wasn't the public told beforehand that Google would be collecting information with its Street View cars? At the very least, a company that claims to do no evil should be more transparent. There is a lot of potential ways this information could be used. It could, for example, be sold to market research companies to trend sales of various goods and products. Just another example of the way people's private information is being hijacked by technology companies for potential use as a commodity.
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