| Google's Street View cars collected the locations of millions of laptops, mobile phones, besides other
wep hackdevices everywhere, an exercise that raises novel privacy concerns, CNET has confirmed.
The cars were supposed to collect the locations of Wi-Fi access points. But Google also recorded the highway addresses and unique identifiers of computers and various other devices using those wireless networks after which made the comprehensive data publicly published through Google.com until a couple of weeks ago.
In france they data protection authority, referred to as Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libert¡§|s (CNIL) recently contacted CNET and said its investigation confirmed that Street View cars collected these unique hardware IDs. In March, CNIL's probe generated a superb of 100,000 euros, about $143,000.
The confirmation comes as concerns about location privacy seem to be growing. Apple was the target of fire in April for recording logs of approximate location data on iPhones, and consequently released a fix. That controversy sparked some disclosures about other companies' location privacy practices, questions and complaints from congressmen, a couple U.S. Senate hearings, together with the now-inevitable lawsuits seeking class action status.
A previous CNET article, published June 15 and triggered by your research of security consultant Ashkan Soltani, was the first to are convinced that Google made these unique hardware IDs--called MAC addresses--publicly available by using a
crack wep interface. Google curbed the practice of a week later.
But it was unclear the moment whether Google's location database included the hardware IDs of only access points and wireless hubs or client devices, which include computers and smartphones, at the same time.
Anecdotal evidence suggested that they been trapped. Alissa Cooper, chief computer scientist inside the Center for Democracy and Technology and co-chair connected with an Internet Engineering Task Force on geolocation, said her 2009 address was indexed by Google's location database. Nick Doty, a lecturer along the University of California at Berkeley who co-teaches the Technology and Policy Lab, discovered that Google listed his former home inside the Capitol Hill neighborhood in Seattle.
"It can be beneficial to possess some clarity about why and just how (a hardware address) got inside so people can act accordingly," says Soltani, the protection researcher. |
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