Search Results for: google "street view" privacy

At the rate that reports keep flying in about Google ruffling the feathers of governments regarding data collection and privacy you would think the United Nations might set up a subcommittee on Google ‘concerns’.

Now we can add South Korea to the list of governments that feel the need to dig into Google’s efforts in their country as they relate to data and their citizens.

Reuters reports

Google Inc’s Seoul office was raided on Tuesday on suspicion its mobile advertising unit AdMob had illegally collected location data without consent, South Korean police said, the latest setback to the Internet search firm’s Korean operations.

The probe into suspected collection of data on where a user is located without consent highlights growing concerns about possible misuse of private information as the use of mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets increases.

You really know it’s the day before Thanksgiving when the following can be passed off as news.

Apparently Google has some fans in Deutschland as evidenced by how these supporters have shown their ‘love’. As you may or may not know, Germany has been a bit of a flashpoint for Google’s continuing Street View battles regarding privacy etc etc. As a result of this battle, Google provided Germans the opportunity to opt out of the program by allowing households to say “Nein” to the service and have their home blurred out of their street view.

As Search Engine Land reports, German Google supporters have shown an odd way to exhibit their Google-lust.

Some people who chose to blur their houses on Google Street View in Germany received an unexpected real life blurring: Google fans who threw eggs at their homes.

(Meanwhile, encrypted search is coming this week.)

Google recently realized they’d inadvertently been drive-by spying on WiFi networks. Part of the data collection was intentional: they meant to collect the SSID info and MAC addresses as they drove by in Street View cars—but they unintentionally went beyond that to collect whatever snippets of information were transmitted over non-passworded networks:

In that blog post [here], and in a technical note sent to data protection authorities the same day, we said that while Google did collect publicly broadcast SSID information (the WiFi network name) and MAC addresses (the unique number given to a device like a WiFi router) using Street View cars, we did not collect payload data (information sent over the network). But it’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) WiFi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products.

Google can’t seem to get out of its own way sometimes. Of course, it is a big company that may have certain parts doing one thing while another part does another without real knowledge of each other’s plans. That happens in big business. Of course, you would suspect that there is some kind of algorithm keeping everyone in order, right? If it is, it certainly doesn’t have a “WTF?” filter on it.

Apparently there needs to be some good old fashioned human supervision based on some of the decisions coming out of the Googleplex these days. The latest is the fact that Google collected the final four digits of the entrants of an art contest whose entrants were kids. Google claims a ‘no harm, no foul’ on this one but just the idea of it happening is enough for a raised eyebrow or two.

Google is so good at what it does that it actually uncovers illegal acts and helps bring perpetrators to justice. Well that may be a bit of a stretch but in the “is that really news department” is an incident where the roving Google camera caught a Canadian tree-killer in the act. As a result, the parties that were committing “treeicide” (not a real word, I know but this is a blog, remember) may find themselves facing some significant fines.

Wired magazine tells us

Forget about all of those ubiquitous police surveillance cameras in your city: the new sheriff in town is that shifty Google Maps camera wheeling through your neighborhood.

Recently, a property owner in Canada was charged with illegal removal of trees after a Google camera helped capture the evidence, according to CanWest News Service.