Google Admits To Collecting Emails and Passwords

Posted by kdawson on Friday October 22, 2010 @08:30AM from the but-we-didn't-inhale dept.

wiredmikey writes "Alan Eustace, Google's Senior VP of Engineering & Research, just put up an interesting blog post on how Google will be creating stronger privacy controls. Right at the end is an interesting admission: that after Streetview WiFi Payload data was analyzed by regulators, their investigations revealed that some incredibly private information was harvested in some cases. Eustace noted that '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.'"

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Re:No, google admits to collecting wifi packet dat by WrongSizeGlass · 2010-10-22 08:43 · Score: 0, Flamebait

While it might not be ethical to capture full packet dumps, they probably did it to triangulate wifi access points better. This is a problem of privacy, but not of outright evil.
Google is a big company full of a lot of really smart people. How is it that none of them analyzed the process or the results during the 'testing phase' to determine they might just get this type of data? Their intentions may not have been 'evil' but negligence is no excuse. Not acting to prevent this type of data being gathered in the first place is 'evil' enough.