Okay Geek Farm
Whoops - Google grabbed entire e-mails and passwords with their Street View cars
Brandon Davenport
From the department of “can we try again?”, Google has publicly noted that among the fragmented data their street-view cars picked up via WiFi, whole URL’s, passwords and emails were among the data. The reasoning behind the street-view cars skimming your WiFi came down to a “programming error”, and since then nothing much has been said from Google — but now, things are getting a little more interesting.
“It’s clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords. We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and I would like to apologize again for the fact that we collected it in the first place.” — Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering & Research — Read more in Google’s blog
Now we do need to commend Google for staying transparent with this giant sized fumble, but we are still very worried that that data could get in the wrong hands, after being in so many hands. After the incident with the Google employee stalking girls, Google can’t afford any more mis-haps like this.
