A Google Street View car in Germany Google revealed late yesterday that it had mistakenly collected information about Internet sites people had visited on public Wi-Fi networks. The admission came from Google engineering head Alan Eustace in the form of a blog post on Friday afternoon. In the statement, Google said that it had been unknowingly gathering the personal data for over three years through its Street View photo-mapping feature. The discovery was made during internal investigation resulting from earlier concerns by German regulators over the issue. Two weeks ago, Google told European officials that, while it did collect data from Wi-Fi services for location technologies, it did not save private user data. In yesterday's announcement, however, Google admitted that these claims were actually incorrect. This incident is the latest in the Internet privacy debate, following Facebook 's move this week to update privacy and security settings for its users' accounts. European officials are expected to move on this issue, which has been controversial to both their citizens and governments for some time. Google had already agreed to take additional privacy measures in Germany last July after the nation's data protection agency raised concerns about Street View. Hong Kong legislator, Samson Tam , said that Google may have violated Hong Kong's laws on 'interception of communications and surveillance', and was suspected of 'dishonest use of computers'.
A Google car in Germany Google revealed late yesterday that it had mistakenly collected information about Internet sites people had visited on public networks. The admission came from Google engineering head Alan Eustace in the form of a post on Friday afternoon. In the statement, Google said that it had been unknowingly gathering the personal data for over three years through its photo-mapping feature. The discovery was made during internal investigation resulting from earlier concerns by German regulators over the issue. Two weeks ago, Google told European officials that, while it did collect data from Wi-Fi services for location technologies, it did not save private user data. In yesterday's announcement, however, Google admitted that these claims were actually incorrect. This incident is the latest in the Internet privacy debate, following 's move this week to update privacy and security settings for its users' accounts. European officials are expected to move on this issue, which has been controversial to both their citizens and governments for some time. Google had already agreed to take additional privacy measures in Germany last July after the nation's data protection agency raised concerns about Street View. Hong Kong legislator, , said that Google may have violated Hong Kong's laws on 'interception of communications and surveillance', and was suspected of 'dishonest use of computers'.
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Samson Tam