Last week, Facebook was in the doghouse over privacy.

This week, it’s Google.

What happened?

As most people know, Google has special cars that are equipped with special cameras mounted on the roof…

…and these cars go all over the world collecting “Street View” photos of just about every house and business on the planet.

Is that creepy enough?

Okay, it gets worse.

Last week, it was reported that Google “inadvertently” discovered that as these “Street View” cars drove up and down every street in the world…

…“by mistake” the cars were automatically recording what websites some people were visiting and may have even recorded their email and some passwords.

Oops.

That’s bad.

And here’s what you need to know:

QUESTION #1:

So what data, exactly, was being collected?

Let me put it this way:

If you have ever used a wi-fi network that was not privacy-protected, like at a coffee shop or even at your home…

…then any info you sent across the Internet (websites visited, videos watched, email sent or received, maybe even passwords typed) might have been recorded by Google if one of their “Street View” cars drove by at the time.

QUESTION #2:

Was info that was sent or received over privacy-protected wifi networks also at risk?

As far as we know, that data was not compromised.

But:

Stay tuned, because additional details have continued to be revealed by Google…

…so we may find out that additional info was, in fact, gathered by Google that hasn’t been disclosed yet.

QUESTION #3:

How did this happen?

Google claims it was a mistake…

…and that they NEVER meant to gather any personal info.

In this case, Google claims a Google engineer wrote an experimental piece of code that sampled data from unsecure wifi hotspots…

…and that experimental code was later mistakenly included in the software on the Google “Street View” cars.

I don’t know if that’s true or not…

…but I DO think it’s FEASIBLE that a company could make this mistake and gather info it didn’t even want, because the systems and processes companies use are huge and wildly complex.

QUESTION #4:

What will happen with all this personal data now?

Reports vary about how Google will deal with this data.

Some reports say Google will let a third party examine the data.

Other reports say Google is storing the data so investigators and regulators can view it.

And yet other reports say Google has already begun destroying the data under the supervision of a third party.

On Monday May 17, Google posted this info about the data breach and the data itself:

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2010/05/wifi-data-collection-update.html

QUESTION #5:

Should I be panicked about this?

Maybe…depending on what websites you have been visiting and what you’ve been saying in your email.

But seriously…the amount of data these cars could have gathered from any one individual is slight.

Yet what is more troubling is this:

• A roving army of cars was able to travel the world gathering personal data…and we had no clue it was going on
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• A giant company like Google, that employs some of the smartest people in the world…claims it had no idea it was gathering and storing all this info
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• The biggest danger from this Google mistake…is that it provides a significant “proof of concept” to others (governments, advertisers, criminals) about what is possible in the future.

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