'Creepy' Google Street View accused of 'the single biggest privacy breach in history'



Google has been accused of 'the single biggest privacy breach in history' after its Street View camera cars collected internet data from homes around the world.

Described as 'creepy', it is alleged to have deliberately snooped on unprotected wi-fi connections of computer users in Britain and elsewhere, including their emails.

Google is said to have amassed the information as its specially adapted cars drove around public places, filming them for its Street View website.

A Google Street View car pictured in Dublin. An Australian senator has lambasted Google for collecting private information about people's wireless internet connections

The controversial site allows viewers to see images of individual homes, shops, offices and pubs taken by a fleet of cars.

Google admitted this month that its Street View cars had spied on people's internet use for three years, although it said the data was collected by mistake and was never used.

It said the vehicles' special radio antennae had scooped up emails and other bits of information as they passed by.

However, Stephen Conroy, Australia's minister for broadband, communications and the digital economy, has claimed at a Senate committee hearing that Google had collected the private information on purpose.

He accused it of acting as if it were above the law, adding: 'That is your personal data including, potentially, emails.

'Their response is simply, "Trust us".'







Blaming the firm's chief executive Eric Schmidt, he said: 'I think the approach taken by Mr Schmidt is a bit creepy, frankly.

'This has been worldwide. Google takes the view that they can do anything they want. It is possible that this has been the largest privacy breach in history across Western democracies.

'They consider that they are the appropriate people to make the decisions about people's privacy data and that they are perfectly entitled to drive the streets and collect as much private information by photographing over fences and collecting data information.'

He told the hearing, which is discussing his plan for an internet filter in Australia, that Google deliberately wrote a computer code to gather the information, an allegation denied by the firm.

The UK Information Commissioner has told Google to delete the information, while Germany's consumer protection watchdog said the internet giant had acted 'illegally'.



Google refused to comment on Mr Conroy's comments but, referring to the Street View row, a spokesman said: 'It was quite simply a mistake - a failure of communication between and within teams.



'In 2006 an engineer working on a WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data.



'A year later, when our mobile team launched a separate project to collect basic WiFi data using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software - even though the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data.'

