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Google did collect passwords with their Street View cars after all

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A while ago Google’s Street View cars were caught red-handed, collecting data from unprotected Wi-Fi networks. The company then declared that it had no actual intention of gathering the data and hasn’t used it in anyway whatsoever so I thought things might just end there. However, as the investigation continues things start to look less and less harmless and there might be a storm brewing over Mountain View.

Apparently the Wi-Fi data “accidentally” collected by the Google cars contained serious stuff such as email access passwords and extracts of the content of email messages. In addition quite a lot of people (including a number of lawyers) claimed that Google knew exactly what their cars were doing and this raises plenty of questions about what they did with the collected information.

Not that the whole story about a piece of code left there by accident seemed all that believable in the first place, but the fact that there is private data involved makes matters way more delicate. Frankly, I cannot see Google coming out clean of all this.

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