Google Admits To Collecting Emails and Passwords

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.'"

Comments

Don't wait for Google policy.

[FooAtWFU]

Google policy is inadequate to protect your data. Encrypt your wifi. That is all.

No, google admits to collecting wifi packet data

[A beautiful mind]

This is entirely different what the summary and the title implies, which is deliberately seeking out email or password data.

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.