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Google Admits WiFi Data Collection Mistake 
By: Doug Caverly 2010-05-17 An old publicists' trick is to release negative information on a Friday afternoon because a lot of people - including reporters - will be wrapping things up for the week and pay less attention to the news over the weekend. And whether the timing was intentional or not, Google announced late on Friday that it had collected payload data from open WiFi networks.
Google claimed that this was an unintentional move on its part. The company's Street View cars were only supposed to take note of WiFi networks' names and MAC addresses when mapping areas, and not pay any attention to payload data (which is the actual information sent over a wireless network). But a post on the Official Google Blog explained, "In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google's Street View cars, they included that code in their software - although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data." So Google's now stopped collecting WiFi data of every sort, and is looking to delete all the data it's already got. (The only thing holding up the process is that the search giant wants to bring in a third party and consult with different countries' regulators.) Also, although this may not be a direct response, Google promised that it will launch an encrypted version of Google Search sometime this week. About the Author: Doug is a staff writer for SearchNewz, WebProNews, InternetFinancialNews, and SecurityProNews. |
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