Google Stole Information and Covered It Up

Recall Google's claims that it didn't harvest information deliberately. They said they didn't know their software was doing that. (Heh.) From the MailOnline.

They downloaded emails, text messages, photographs and documents from wi-fi networks as they photographed virtually every British road.

It is two years since Google first admitted stealing fragments of personal data, but claimed it was a ‘mistake’.

Now the full scale of its activities has emerged amid accusations of a cover-up after US regulators found a senior manager was warned as early as 2007 that the information was being captured as its cars trawled the country but did nothing.

Around one in four home networks in the UK is thought to be unsecured – lacking password protection – allowing personal data to be collected. Technology websites and bloggers have suggested that Google harvested the information simply because it was able to do so and would later work out a way to use it to make money.

(Emphasis added.) Marius Milner, a software engineer who now lives in California wrote the Google Street View software "repeatedly warned that it collected personal data, and called for a legal and privacy review." He has pleaded the Fifth Amendment and will not answer investigators questions.

Whoops, we scooped up your pictures! Oh, no, we got your emails! How did that happen?! Oopsie-daisy, we got your texts, documents, and passwords! We didn't mean to. Hey, it's no biggie. Don't worry; our motto is "Don't be evil!"

I think what Google is doing is selling itself to bureaucrats and politicians who aren't inclined to, say, care too much about privacy issues. They're offering an intelligence-gathering partnership. The big selling point is that their hands aren't quite as tied. So, they reason, if you guys just leave us alone, we'll gather information that helps us market to consumers, and we'll let you take a peek.

Digusting, if true.

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posted by rdbrewer at 02:20 PM

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