Google Woes

Source: 14:00 on October 19, 2010, EDT.
Stephanie Levitz, The Canadian Press


Quote: "Google accidentally mapped much more than addresses, says privacy boss.

OTTAWA - Millions of Canadians search the web every day, but the country's privacy commissioner says their favourite search engine was doing too much research into them.

Jennifer Stoddart says Google broke Canadian privacy laws when it accidentally collected personal information from unsecured wireless networks while putting together its Street View mapping service.

An investigation by Stoddart's office found complete emails, addresses, usernames and passwords. Even a list that provided the names of people suffering from certain medical conditions was collected.

"This incident was a serious violation of Canadians' privacy rights," she said in a statement.

Thousands of Canadians were likely affected, Stoddart said, by what amounted to a careless error on the part of an engineer.

According to Stoddart's investigation, the code he'd written to map wireless Internet signals also allowed for the capture of communications over unencrypted networks, but he never submitted it for review to Google's lawyers so no one was aware of the potential for problems.

Even when a German data collector first raised concerns about the Wi-Fi mapping earlier this year, Google denied it was collecting anything other than what was publicly available.

But upon a review, Google staff realized their cars were capturing much more than the flower pots in front of people's homes.

In an interview, Stoddart said her team was taken aback by the extent of the information.

"We had heard there was no personal information collected, we had heard that it would just be snippets, it would unintelligible, and in fact it was very intelligible," she said.

"There was a lot of personal information, some very sensitive personal information, and it wasn't that hard for them to get at it, so Google is sitting on a mound of personal information of a highly identifiable kind."

In its response to Stoddart's findings, the company said it had no intention to use the data and would keep it safe until all investigations are complete, then delete it.

Google did not immediately respond to a request for an interview". (Unquote)

Full article: http://home.mytelus.com/telusen/portal/NewsChannel.aspx?ArticleID=news/capfeed ational/OG0007.xml&CatID=National

 

While I appreciate that this may be viewed as an extreme breech of privacy we have to understand that google is an American company which has the best interest of our country at heart.
Keep in mid that Michale Moore created a fine documentary years ago called "Canadian Bacon." Now we know that the Canadians are massing on the border just waiting to invade when our guard is down.

So the more we know about them Canadians the better!

 

Well .... the Americans may have Google ... but we Canadians have a state of the art alert system, yup we do!

 

Tha Canadians have a formidable Army, massing on the border,Barry. :snckr:
Their Front Line Strike Force is something to be feared.



The Second Line of Defence, is just as feared as the first.

 

Yes but we have a countermeasure in place housed in a heavily fortified bunker in Frostbite Falls Minnesota!

​

 

What puzzles me is everyone moans about privacy, yet drive a car, use a credit card, make a phone call on a cell phone, etc, and there is data stored and saved about you yet nobody moans about it because officially its not kept, really, Honestly, yea right, too much valuable marketing and policing information for that to be true.

 

Love the images, Doug and Barry - too funny and they cracked me right up!!!

And gathering information on Canadians would be pretty darn simple - but you gotta come visit. Yup, we don't store much info on computers and the bewildering internet (too darn hard to pedal fast enough in our igloos to generate enough power to run all these blasted electric things! :snckr:

Match - while yup, there is way too much information about all of us wandering around out there, adding onto it isn't always a good thing. I'm quite sure Google will destroy the 'sensitive' stuff but wouldn't it be dreadful if, for instance, a staff member had sold some of it - yikes.

 

This is very true Mara, but surely the bigger issue are the people that have Unsecured Wireless Networks that allowed Google to collect this information in the first place, while everyone is jumping up and down complaining would they not do better checking if they have an open door to their personal information, I can walk down our street with a Mobile phone and find 4 or 5 Unsecured Networks, now if I wanted I could access those and find out what information is available, and I'll bet that their are unscrupulous people already doing it!!