Google Audits Street View Data Systems

schliz writes "Google's plans to upgrade to high-definition Street View in Australia are on hold until it completes a rigorous internal audit of the processes, it announced today. The company is currently being investigated by international regulators about possible privacy breaches when it became known that its Street View vehicles were capturing not only publicly available SSIDs and MAC addresses, but also samples of payload data transmitted over these networks."

Comments

"Publicly Available"

[dward90]

While I'm not an expert on security or privacy, it seems to me like "publicly available" should mean that they didn't gather any data that citizens weren't openly broadcasting anyway. From an ethical perspective, it's shaky at best, but it's probably a huge difference legally.

I'm not endorsing Google's collection, but aren't people who openly broadcast their data be at least *a little* at fault here?

Re:this is gonna be interesting

[Lunix Nutcase]

Market cap is not synonymous with the size of a company. BP has 10x the yearly revenue and 4.5x as many employees as Google. It is the far larger company.