Far too often, Google has been getting their hands slapped over privacy issues. The latest was brought forth by Google itself (after inquiry from German regulators).
As part of the Google Street view project, Google had been collecting information about WiFi networks — mainly for the purpose of providing better location data when you don’t have GPS. All you would need to do that are the network names — unfortunately, that’s not all Google was collecting.
The software that was in charge of doing this work was also collecting personal information — like, stray web requests and email. It is troubling that someone at Google thought it was a good idea to put code in the application to grab that information out of the air, and store it.
So, nevertheless, Google has apologized for their actions (again) — does anyone else feel that apologies are far too cheap? You can do anything you want, as long as you apologize if something goes awry.
Assuming Google doesn’t do this already (if they do, they should start over), I want to see Google create a team of privacy nut programmers that approve every line of code that ships. It’s Quality Assurance, but for privacy — Privacy Assurance. Come on Google, let’s see you take some solid steps to prevent (with certainty) anything like this from happening again.
