Google has admitted to collecting fragments -amounting to 600MB – of personal data through Wi-Fi networks when its Street View cars mapped various towns and cities in 34 countries around the world.
In May this year, Alan Eustace, a senior vice president in engineering and research at the Mountain View company, said Street View cars had been “mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open Wi-Fi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products”.
In June, the company said it had deleted private wireless data collected in Austria, Denmark and Ireland.
A string of code in the production systems of Street View cars allowed Google to retrieve and store information about the networks’ location, names and Media Access Control (MAC) addresses on wireless networks that were not password-protected.
VS…—the interception of communications without permission.
The UK’s information commissioner set something of a precedent last month, saying that an investigation by the commissioner’s office had found that Google is unlikely to have collected “significant amounts of personal data”, and that there is “no evidence as yet that the data captured by Google has caused or could cause any individual detriment”.
“Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and to make it universally accessible and useful… a significant amount of information can be found in mapping the world, by gaining a better understanding of the world in general.” —-Stephen Chau, product manager for Google Maps
Bankston, though, who himself is viewable on a street view photograph walking to work, says that these Street Views represent an ominous invasion of privacy. “We’re moving into a future where not only must you realize the risk that you might be photographed in public, but where it’s becoming a near certainty that you will be captured any time you go out,” he says. “It’s indicative of the direction in which we’re moving — where everything occurring anywhere is Google-able.”
Possible solution — obscuring the faces of people
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a fundamental principle of privacy – that information should only be used to further the specific purpose for which it was collected. All actions boil down to an individual’s right to privacy – and what information requires prior consent before being made publicly accessible.
Street View—a way to show you what a place looks like as if you were there in person—enable people around the world to learn more about these areas—This allows you to visit places you don’t normally—Google has continued to innovate: “With each new release the imagery is of a higher quality and there are more tools to protect privacy, the technology evolves and it’s easier to navigate.”
—One of the things that caused us surprise was how different the various nations’ view of privacy were.So we had to change the way we operate to accommodate that. (Localisation of international companies)
—“In many ways new tech is always a little concerning to people. Like caller ID on [mobile] phones – that was concerning when it was a new thing, now it’s accepted and agreed to be a useful feature. You have to draw a contrast between how many people use and the minority that are relatively loud. For us, it’s about enhancing the use of Google Maps and we know that that increases by 20% at least when Street View functionality is added, making it the most popular web-mapping site on the planet.”
