Google could face fines under privacy laws (after admitting downloading private emails & passwords)

[Turborama]

Source: The Independent (UK)

Google faces being the first company to incur heavy fines under British privacy laws, after admitting downloading private emails and passwords.

Britain’s Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, announced yesterday that he is launching a new investigation into the Street View project, in which Google sent cars around photographing residential streets. In the process, they “mistakenly” collected entire emails and passwords from privately owned computers connected to wireless networks.

The breach of privacy has infuriated campaigners who say that Google should not have embarked on the exercise in the first place.

Alex Deane, director of privacy campaign group Big Brother Watch, said: "As if building up a database of photographs of millions of people's private homes wasn't enough, the news that Google has also ‘harvested’ email addresses and passwords is nothing short of outrageous. Google must launch an urgent investigation as to how this gross invasion of privacy was allowed to happen."

Read more: http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/google-could-face-fines-under-privacy-laws-2115462.html

[cutlassmama]

1. Good!

[mkultra]

2. who cares

they are mapping wifi hotspots. If you don't want people to know that information, don't have your router broadcast it to the world. As far as im concerned, if you broadcast information, then its your fault if people receive it. If you posted address on your garage door in giant characters, i bet someone would collect that information too.


Same goes for people that don't like them taking pictures of their houses. ITS IN PUBLIC. people can see it with their eyes.

[Turborama]

3. Google do

They're "mortified", apparently.

[mkultra]

5. im sure, it was probably accidentally gathered info

people putting private information into ID descriptor broadcast fields will be picked up by any wifi sniffer.

[boppers]

9. They weren't just gathering SSID.

They were gathering and storing snippets of the radio broadcasts.

So, if I *wasn't* using encryption, and they were driving down my street, they might pick up (simplified for explanation):
'\r\n http://democraticunderground.com \r\n POST \r\username:boppers\r\password:seekrit\rSSID:boplan\r\n'

They picked up a website, my username, my password, *and* my SSID, because all of that was being broadcast, and they then stored all of that. They could have only filtered the broadcasts for, or stored, the SSID, but they didn't. As a result, they got all kinds of data, and that makes people *very* nervous.

[mkultra]

11. again, dont broadcast it if you dont want it to be recieved.

Its should be common sense.

[Xithras]

6. I'm sure someone in their PR department considered that a suitably contrite term.

Me, and tens of thousands of others, run software that does the same thing.

If you don't want your emails and passwords read by other people, don't broadcast them to the world. That's like writing your SSN on the front of your house, and then screaming about an invasion of privacy when someone reads it as they're walking past.

[gristy]

4. Good for the Independent. They put "mistake" in quotes.

It struck me as just absurd when I first read that Google said they collected this information by mistake.

[katandmoon]

7. Ditto.

[boppers]

10. Have you seen their source code? I have.

It's a typical bungle: Collect everything people are broadcasting to you just in case your code breaks, later realize that people weren't aware they were broadcasting all this private data to the whole freaking world, call the lawyers and start the apologies.

It's just a shimmed/tweaked version of kismet. Not the fate kind, this:
http://www.kismetwireless.net/

[Egnever]

8. Silly

Google should win this. This was not collected from secured networks, only open publicly broadcasting networks.If you work on an open network IMHO you have no right to bitch when someone pulls info from it.

[rayofreason]

12. I like and use Google products...

...but any company with as much power as Google merits close scrutiny. We depend on Google to keep our private information private.

Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

[mkultra]

13. you should depend on yourself as well.