Time For Google to Grow Up: Open Wi-Fi Privacy Mistake Must Be The Last

Last week’s news that Google’s Street View cars collected the content of messages flowing over open wireless networks while mapping the location of those access points is a privacy wake-up call to the company and wireless users alike.Google had previously represented that it did not collect or store what it calls “payload data” and what EFF and the law call communications “content” — the actual information that was being transmitted by users over the unprotected networks. But on Friday the company admitted that its audit of the software deployed in the Street View cars revealed that the devices actually had been inadvertently collecting content transmitted over non-password protected Wi-Fi networks. To its credit, Google publicly admitted the error.There’s no reason to doubt Google’s claim of mistake, but at this point in their growth and sophistication, Google should not be making these kinds of privacy errors. Google programmers wrote the Street View Wi-Fi access mapping code and Google employees used that code to collect about 600 gigabytes of extra data. Someone at the company should also have ensured that the code, both as written and in practice was (1) collecting only the data necessary for the project, (2) collecting only the data that Google represented that it was collecting, and (3) otherwise in compliance with the law.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/time-google-grow-make-open-wi-fi-privacy-mistake