Google’s Street View Cars Collect Emails & Passwords

Google has admitted to collecting personal data during the companies Street View project.

The street view project took place between 2006 and 2010 in 30 countries around the world. A fleet of adapted cars fitted with nine directional cameras, a GPS positioning unit and Wi-Fi antennas traveled all areas accessible by cars to record 360 degree images of the streets in these countries. The panoramic images have been included in Google Maps and Google Earth as another feature to these applications.

They confessed that emails, passwords and other sensitive public data had been collected by the fleet of cars from unsecure wireless networks. The technology giant claims that the data was gathered by accident and nobody has analyzed the 600GB of data.

It is reported that the antennae was used to construct a map of wireless networks which could be used in products where by Google uses geo-location as part of its service. The geo-location function is used in such products as PPC Search Marketing campaigns.

Apparently the technology used was based on some experimental code produced by one of Google’s engineers. The experimental code sampled data broadcast publicly over unsecure wireless networks. This mistake by the company may result in some hefty fines for breaching privacy laws. It does seem slightly strange that a company of Google’s size is capable of implementing experimental code and not testing the system before releasing their equipment on Joe public. It would be interesting to hear your thoughts and views on the subject?