Google went through the trouble of putting out a quite detailed blog post yesterday to apologize for having collected “in error” Wi-Fi data in Ireland through its Google Street View cars, saying it “failed badly”. The search giant added that although it had collected data “samples”, it had not used it for any of Google’s service offers.
Review outcome
The news came after the search giant reviewed data collected for its location-based services like Google Maps, as it had been asked by the Hamburg-based data protection authority (DPA) to do so, Senior VP, Engineering & Research, Alan Eustace wrote.
Google first denied collecting payload data (information sent over Wi-Fi networks) but yesterday acknowledged the contrary, assuring that it had since deleted such data collected in Ireland, at the request of the Irish Data Protection Authority.
Mr Eustace said that Google is now “reaching out to Data Protection Authorities in the other relevant countries about how to dispose of the remaining data as quickly as possible.”
What was collected?
While explaining that Google Street View cars are supposed to collect only “publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router)”… He also minimized the catch: “we will typically have collected only fragments of payload data because: our cars are on the move; someone would need to be using the network as a car passed by; and our in-car WiFi equipment automatically changes channels roughly five times a second. In addition, we did not collect information traveling over secure, password-protected WiFi networks.”
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