Google has deleted private wireless data mistakenly collected by its “Street View” cars in Austria, Denmark and Ireland, it said in a letter to US lawmakers.
Google, in the letter posted online on Friday on the Web site of the Energy and Commerce Committee of the US House of Representatives, reiterated that the data was never used in any Google product or service.
Google also repeated an apology for the gathering of personal information sent over unsecured wireless networks by the Street View cars used to create the panoramic pictures featured in Google Maps
The letter from Pablo Chavez, Google’s director of public policy, was in response to questions posed by US representatives Henry Waxman, Joe Barton and Edward Markey to Google chief executive Eric Schmidt.
According to Google, Sreet View cars taking photographs of cities in more than 30 countries inadvertently gathered fragments of personal information, so-called payload data, sent over unsecured Wi-Fi systems.
In the letter, Chavez said that “at the request of authorities in Ireland, Denmark, and Austria, we deleted payload data identified as coming from those countries.”
He said data gathered in the US was being retained for legal reasons and did not address the situation in other countries.
“We have been retaining data collected in the United States, consistent with our obligations related to pending civil litigation matters,” Chavez said.
Google is facing civil suits in Oregon and several other US states demanding millions of dollars in damages over its collection of personal wireless data.
Google is accused of violating local and federal privacy laws, but Chavez said he did not believe Google had broken US law.
“We believe it does not violate US law to collect payload data from networks that are configured to be openly accessible (ie, not secured by encryption and thus accessible by any user’s device),” he said.
“We emphasize that being lawful and being the right thing to do are two different things, and that collecting payload data was a mistake for which we are profoundly sorry,” Chavez said.
“Maintaining people’s trust is crucial to everything we do and, by mistakenly using code that collected payload data, we fell short,” he said. “We are determined to learn all the lessons we can from our mistake.”
“The payload data has never been used in any Google product or service,” he said, adding that only two Google engineers had ever had access to it.
“The first instance involved the individual engineer who designed the software,” he said.
“The second instance was when we became aware that payload data may have been collected from unencrypted WiFi networks and a single security engineer tested the data to verify that this was the case,” he said.
Chavez said Google had stopped the collection of Wi-Fi data, used to provide location-based services such as driving directions in Google Maps and other products, by Street View cars.
STEPPING UP: Diminished US polar science presence mean opportunities for the UK and other countries, although China or Russia might also fill that gap, a researcher said The UK’s flagship polar research vessel is to head to Antarctica next week to help advance dozens of climate change-linked science projects, as Western nations spearhead studies there while the US withdraws. The RRS Sir David Attenborough, a state-of-the-art ship named after the renowned British naturalist, would aid research on everything from “hunting underwater tsunamis” to tracking glacier melt and whale populations. Operated by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the country’s polar research institute, the 15,000-tonne icebreaker — boasting a helipad, and various laboratories and gadgetry — is pivotal to the UK’s efforts to assess climate change’s impact there. “The saying goes
Floods on Sunday trapped people in vehicles and homes in Spain as torrential rain drenched the northeastern Catalonia region, a day after downpours unleashed travel chaos on the Mediterranean island of Ibiza. Local media shared videos of roaring torrents of brown water tearing through streets and submerging vehicles. National weather agency AEMET decreed the highest red alert in the province of Tarragona, warning of 180mm of rain in 12 hours in the Ebro River delta. Catalan fire service spokesman Oriol Corbella told reporters people had been caught by surprise, with people trapped “inside vehicles, in buildings, on ground floors.” Santa Barbara Mayor Josep Lluis
Police in China detained dozens of pastors of one of its largest underground churches over the weekend, a church spokesperson and relatives said, in the biggest crackdown on Christians since 2018. The detentions, which come amid renewed China-US tensions after Beijing dramatically expanded rare earth export controls last week, drew condemnation from US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who on Sunday called for the immediate release of the pastors. Pastor Jin Mingri (金明日), founder of Zion Church, an unofficial “house church” not sanctioned by the Chinese government, was detained at his home in the southern city of Beihai on Friday evening, said
SANCTIONS: Congolese Minister of Foreign Affairs Therese Kayikwamba Wagner called on the EU to tighten sanctions against Rwanda during an event in Brussels The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DR Congo) has accused the EU of “an obvious double standard” for maintaining a minerals deal with Rwanda to supply Europe’s high-tech industries when it deployed a far-wider sanctions regime in response to the war in Ukraine. Congolese Minister of Foreign Affairs Therese Kayikwamba Wagner urged the EU to levy much stronger sanctions against Rwanda, which has fueled the conflict in the eastern DR Congo, describing the bloc’s response to breaches of the DR Congo’s territory as “very timid.” Referencing the EU’s response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she said: “It is an obvious double standard
RSS