The largest search engine provider Google is entrapped with a new controversy. They are accused of stealing the passwords and e-mails of personal accounts of Internet users on open Wi-Fi hot spots in France which they claim as accident. But a normal human being can detect it as intentional as they first log into the Wi-Fi network and stolen the information according to their plan. The French National Commission on Information and Liberty (NCIL) has recently placed the accusation against them where they asked a clarification from Google.
Stealing the data from Wi-Fi network
The National privacy regulator of France warned Google for their activity when Google published the news of ‘accidently’ stealing the ‘payload data’ through the Wi-Fi network. Google claims that their moving car used for the street mapping used a code which can detect the payload data.
Commission’s view
In the early June after the publishing of such news by Google in their blog, National Commission of Information and Liberty of France declared to launch an investigation against this stealing. Google recently unveiled that they have collected 600 Gigabytes of data that are passed through the Wi-Fi network of 30 countries. Some countries told them to delete the data, where France asked them to store data to run an investigation. Some other countries than France like Spain, Germany and Italy also said to preserve them for investigation.
Google’s Stand
Google claims that they were collecting fragmented payloads data only which is caught as signal when their car was moving through the unprotected Wi-Fi zones. They mark this incident as mistake as this code was an experimental one for a Wi-Fi project which was first used in 2006. When the new Wi-Fi project for street mapping is initiated, the engineers included the old program unintentionally without realizing that it could collect payload data.
“As soon as we became aware of this problem, we grounded our Street View cars and segregated the data on our network, which we then disconnected to make it inaccessible,” Google said in its blog. “We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and are currently reaching out to regulators in the relevant countries about how to quickly dispose of it.”
Sending data to the respective countries
The information regulatory agency of France CNIL Chairman Alex Turk said, “Google send us the payload data in 4th June, now we are in the process of verifying them and run a open and free investigation on the issue. But we want to ensure the users that their data will be kept safe and private.” He also mentioned, “I think we could make decision about the punishment of Google within September of this year”. CNIL checking the data, e-mails and the baking details for verifying the Google’s stand.
This controversy could led another loss to the Google Buzz their already it had faced several questions for its privacy system. In this context it is very necessary for Google to resolve the matter as soon as possible.
