Privacy Blowup: French, US Officials Home In on Google Street View

“Google has claimed Street View’s collection of data leaking
from unsecured WiFi networks was inadvertent, but that rings
disingenuous to Mark Rotenberg, executive director of the
Electronic Privacy Information Center. “I don’t know how you do
something by accident over three years and in 30 countries,” he
remarked.

“France has become the latest country to investigate potential
wrongdoing on the part of Google (Nasdaq: GOOG) Street View, the
hyper-local image service. The cars used to carry cameras to gather
images for Street View did indeed capture passwords from private
individuals’ WiFi transmissions over unencrypted networks, found
the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty.

“Google’s last official word on the subject was a retraction, in
the Google Official Blog, of its previous assertion that it did not
capture transmitted data (“payloads”) but rather gathered only
“publicly broadcast” information, such as the SSIDs or unique
labels of WiFi routers and their MAC addresses.”

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