Google Under Pressure Over Wi-Fi Privacy Breach
While collecting data for their Street View cars project, Google have come under fire over code that captured personal data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks. While Street View cars were supposed to simply gather images of roads and log the location of Wi-Fi hotspots, they also collected information passing between personal computers and unsecured hotspots.
A coalition of thirty-eight US States have called for an investigation over the privacy breach. They want the people who created the snooping code to be named, to know whether Google tested the Wi-Fi code before they ran it and to understand what was done with the information that was captured. The UK Metropolitan police are also conducting an investigation as whether any British privacy laws have been broken.
Today Google will be meeting with the US coalition to be grilled about the snooping code which created privacy breaches.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, who heads the coalition, said, "We will take all appropriate steps, including potential legal action if warranted, to obtain complete, comprehensive answers."
Google has responded with a statement saying, "It was a mistake for us to include code in our software that collected payload data, but we believe we did nothing illegal."