Google stops sniffing Wi-Fi data after privacy gaffe

14.05.2010
Google has decided to stop its Street View cars from sniffing wireless networking data after an embarrassing privacy gaffe.

The company revealed Friday that Street View vehicles had been sniffing the content of users' Internet communications on open wireless networks, despite the company's earlier .

Google has since discovered that it has been mistakenly collecting the content of communications from non-password-protected Wi-Fi networks, the company said in a .

Google Street View cars are best known for driving around cities and logging snapshots of the area, which are then posted online and integrated with Google Maps. Google cars had been sniffing some network data -- SSID (Service Set Identifier) information and MAC (Media Access Control) addresses -- that was then used to help the company get a better fix on the locations of things in order to improve its Web products. Google had said that it wasn't sniffing other data sent over the networks, but it turned out that this wasn't true.

Google says it was all a mistake.

"In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental Wi-Fi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast Wi-Fi data," Google said, "A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic Wi-Fi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google's Street View cars, they included that code in their software -- although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data."