Google announced back in May of this year that certain data had been collected by their Street View vehicles. The extent and content of the data collection was revealed in a recent blog post on Google’s official blog that covered the creation of stronger internal privacy controls for the company.
According to the post Google had farmed fragmentary data that included usernames and passwords, partial and complete email messages and URLs. The data has been analysed by several external agencies and at least seven of these investigations have been completed. Alan Eustace, Senior VP of Engineering and Research at Google said. “We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and I would like to apologize again for the fact that we collected it in the first place. We are mortified by what happened, but confident that these changes to our processes and structure will significantly improve our internal privacy and security practices for the benefit of all our users”
The changes that he refers to are outlined in the blog post but include the appointment of Alma Whitten as internal director of privacy at Google, increased training for employees in the field and changes to the company’s internal compliance regulations.
Brett Venter
