Google could face further legal action for using its Street Cars to harvest data from resident’s unsecured WiFi networks.
The details were revealed in a recent US Federal Communications Commission report that found the company’s Street View cars not only photographed streets but recorded wi-fi network details, as well as “names, addresses, telephone numbers, URLs, passwords, email, text messages, medical records, video and audio files” back in 2010.
The study alleged that Google engineers and executives knew their Street View cars were stealing personal data from citizens but chose to cover it up.
Despite its claims to the contrary, it appears the company knew about the issue as early as 2007, with at least one senior manager in the US being warned that the cars were snooping.
The report revealed that the Google employee who wrote the code for the Street View software told his superiors of its personal data collection.
It’s unclear what Google intended to do with the information, but since having admitted to the theft in 2010, the company has insisted the snooping was a mistake.
The study concluded that Google broke no laws, but the FCC fined the internet search outfit $25,000 because it claimed the company obstructed its investigation and “willfully and repeatedly violated Commission orders to produce certain information”.
The UK data privacy watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) is now looking into the privacy study conducted by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC).
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Video and audio files, huh? So the Street View cars came with, what, 10 Terabytes of storage on board, to hold all that data?
The amount of data that would be involved here would be incredible. Add that to the fact that the car is taking about 5 large-size images every 50 feet of road. In an urban or even semi-urban setting, the amount of hotspots and the amount of potential users and the amount of potential data is such that, if the GCars were “snooping” into large-size video and audio files etc., it would have had to drive back to HQ after every mile to dump its contents.
And where exactly were the cars grabbing phone numbers from? Not from WiFi.
Sounds like… oh, I dunno… complete BS.