Google Admits To Collecting Emails and Passwords 157
wiredmikey writes "Alan Eustace, Google's Senior VP of Engineering & Research, just put up an interesting blog post on how Google will be creating stronger privacy controls. Right at the end is an interesting admission: that after Streetview WiFi Payload data was analyzed by regulators, their investigations revealed that some incredibly private information was harvested in some cases. Eustace noted that 'It's clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords.'"
Don't wait for Google policy. (Score:5, Informative)
No, google admits to collecting wifi packet data (Score:5, Informative)
While it might not be ethical to capture full packet dumps, they probably did it to triangulate wifi access points better. This is a problem of privacy, but not of outright evil.
Re:Not very private. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Not very private. (Score:2, Informative)
in Canada however, it is the responsibilities of the people that expect to profit from that information, or any corporations not to -retain- that data without a waver.
In Canada, corporations are not people, and do not have fake rights like our activist Supreme Court has given them here in the USA.
Privacy is a Right in Canada. Period.
Re:Don't wait for Google policy. (Score:3, Informative)
Why do you think the password needs to be cracked at all?
1. Make a copy of the hash
2. Replace the hash with a hash of a known password
3. Log in with the known password and do whatever you wanted to do with the account
4. Replace the hash with the copy created in step 1
5. Delete the traces of the login so that the original user would not see the login information.