Google Street View Knew If You Were Watching Porn And It Cost Them $142,000

Everyone knows that Google’s Street View service had been accused of eavesdropping on wireless networks it drove past. Now it is being fined by France’s National Commission on Computing and Liberty, or CNIL.

The CNIL says that the cars grabbed SSIDs and MAC addresses as well as data travelling across the Wi-Fi signals themsleves. When Google said that they had accidentally recorded fragments of the traffic from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks it sent data protection authorities in to high gear and launching multiple investigations.

According to Google its cars only collected fragments of data because it was unlikely that someone would be using their Wi-Fi network when the cars passed by, and that the in-car Wi-Fi equipment changed channels five times a second.

But, Wi-Fi networks usually operating up to 54M bps, a car could snag a lot of data in a fifth of a second. This is one of the main reasons the CNIL got involved. In their 32 page report (NOTE: It’s in French) they reveal numerous instances where the cars gathered information from users browsing the internet, when they passed.

For example on June 2, 2008, Google recorded a user logging in to a porn site. And on March 26, 2009, Google recorded the username and password of user logging into a site so they could arrange a sexual encounter with a stranger. In both instances This information was also tied to addresses of the users homes as determinted by the GPS coordinates.

The CNIL did say that Google did comply with it’s order to stop collecting Wi-Fi data, but said they are still using the data already captured with out notifying those who network it came from.

Google has said they collected this data in an attempt to improve it’s Google Latitude service. The data enabled Google to precisely locate users connecting to Latitude or Google Maps using Wi-Fi enabled mobile devices with out GPS.

However, now that the CNIL’s investigation is complete Google can now delete the data. Peter Fleischer, Google’s Global Privacy Counsel, said, “Deleteing the data has always been our priority, and we’re happy the CNIL has given permission for us to do so.” He went on to apologize and reiterate that they have since stopped this practice.

So now Google must pay €100,000 (US$142,000) , and while I’m sure that’s not much to  Google, it does send a message that they will beheld accountable for it’s actions even ones that it doesn’t do intentionally. It’s also important to note that this is just the first of many investigations of it’s kind from around the world, so this probably won’t be the last that Google has to pay for this fiasco.


Source: MacWorld

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