From Privacy Digest: Google have admitted gathering private data on internet use in the course of the taking photographs for the Google Street View programme.
Google acknowledged on Friday that it had collected snippets of private data around the world. In a blog post on its Web site, the company said information had been recorded as it was sent over unencrypted residential wireless networks as Google’s Street View cars with mounted recording equipment passed by.
The data collection, which Google said was inadvertent and the result of a programming error, took place in all the countries where Street View has been catalogued, including the United States and parts of Europe. Google apologized and said it had not used the information, which it plans to delete in conjunction with regulators.
The Register reports that both Germany prosecutors and the Czech Republic data protection agency have launched investigations:
In effect, Mountain View may have hoovered up emails and other private information if the Google cars travelled over Wi-Fi networks while one of its vehicles was in range. The firm had previously claimed that no payload data was ever intercepted.
Hamburg prosecutors said they had received a complaint against unnamed Google workers over the “unauthorised interception of data”, and confirmed that an investigation - that could take about a fortnight to determine if the allegations warrant a full-blown probe - was underway.
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