Google's personal data theft settlement highlights technology’s vulnerabilities

BETWEEN 2008 and 2010, Google collected bits of personal data — e-mails, Web sites visited and other sensitive material — from unsecured WiFi networks around the world. All its employees needed to gather it were commercially available antennae and some open-source software.

The company says that it didn’t mean to collect people’s sensitive information. It was assembling imagery and location data for its innovative Street View feature, which allows users to stand, virtually, on practically any street corner after just a few mouse clicks. It relied on unencrypted WiFi signals to help match images with locations. But, in the process, its roaming information-gatherers dug into unsecured data streams, gathering far more than they needed for Street View.

This month, Google settled with attorneys general from 38 states and the District, who were jointly investigating the company. It committed to paying $7 million, destroying as soon as possible the personal information it took and implementing a 10-year privacy program. More important than these results, though, is the lingering fact that Google — apparently without meaning to — easily accessed all sorts of information that WiFi users were broadcasting. Technology creates new possibilities — and new vulnerabilities. Americans need to appreciate both.

Critics are preemptively raising similar concerns about Google Glass, a somewhat conspicuous new eyepiece that allows users to take photos, record sounds and take video, perhaps without raising quite the attention that a cellphone camera would. The worry could well be overblown, for now. When the same gadget is small enough to fit onto a contact lens, Americans will have to get used to more of what they do in public being on the (electronic) record.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/google-settlement-highlights-technologys-vulnerabilities/2013/03/27/d4ed8544-8c3a-11e2-9838-d62f083ba93f_story.html