Google announced 3 days ago it had accidentally picked up on Wi-Fi data while taking photos for Google Maps’ Street View feature.
It used the cars to capture videos through the panoramic cameras and on the move it caught the SSIDs and MAC addresses that identified networks and devices. It didn’t know that as it was taking pictures, the camera system collected ‘useful’ data from Local WiFi Networks. This information which are collected are used to improve the location based services.
Google thought that the software collected onlyn harmless and useless data but few days ago the said in the blog they open( http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html ) that there was an additional code in the software that this code was implemented in 2006 by an engineer who was working on an experimental Wi-Fi project and wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast Wi-Fi data.
This opened thousand of questions about the privacy of Street View data.
Google insisted in a statement that it hadn’t intended to collect the data or had any knowledge that it existed until now.
As we can see no one is secure in our days. If you have a WiFi Network at home you can being hacked from everyone if you use none or weak secutiry(WEP keys). Try to use WPA-2 protocol which until now is unbreakable.
Recourses:
1) http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/05/google-street-view-cams/
3) http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/google-says-wifi-data-collection-was-a-mistake.ars
