It appears that Google had some pretty ambitious plans in regards to their map services. The maps alone are quite intensive, covering almost every single mile of concrete road in almost all urban areas all over the world. The addition of street view allowed people to be able to view the world and the streets of the most famous cities and destinations from the comfort of the computer.
Google also had another plan, one that they decided not to push through with, a map of all free WiFi networks –it would have been an interesting resource as it allows users of WiFi devices to be able to find places where they can log in, but at the same time, it also compromised the SSID of various free networks owned by people who lived in residential areas.
There were also concerns that the information would also have data that may contain private information such as snippets of email and the MAC addresses of various devices used in the networks scanned. The problem was first announced after the problem was detected in Germany. Shortly after, there has been a rise in the growing concern as to what Google is planning to do with the data.
It turns out that the gathering of WiFi network data was the result of an unexpected function in the hardware of the Google street car. It appears that a function that was not supposed to be part of the camera vehicle had been written by one of Google’s engineers.
In response, Google has assured the world that they will be hiring a third party company in order to analyze the data and that they will also be deleting all the content from their servers related to the WiFi networks. It is reported that over 600 gigabytes of files will be deleted.
Tags: Google, Google-Street-View, privacy, Wi-Fi