Google street view cars collected your email addy and password

SAN FRANCISCO — Google admitted for the first time its "Street View" cars around the world accidentally collected more personal data than previously disclosed — including complete e-mails and passwords —potentially breathing new life into probes in various countries.

The disclosure comes just days after Canada's privacy watchdog said Google had collected complete e-mails and accused Google of violating the rights of thousands of Canadians.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/39800916...ience-security

Google spokesperson said the company had not examined the roughly 600 GB of data captured by the cars in any detail to avoid violating privacy.

The latest disclosure comes from information from regulators in various countries, who have examined the data collected by Google.

"It's clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire e-mails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords," Google Vice President of Engineering and Research Alan Eustace said in a post on Google's blog on Friday

I heard about this. I now get to change all my gmail passwords. Got to love it.

So who actually believes this part

Google's cars collected the WiFi data in more than 30 countries between 2006 and mid-2010 so that Google could amass data on WiFi hotspots that could help provide location-based services — a project unrelated to taking photos for Google Maps.

But Google apparently thought it was only collecting a limited type of W-iFi data relating to the WiFi network's name and router numbers.

The collection of the additional, so-called payload data was a simple mistake resulting from a piece of computer code that was accidentally included from an experimental project, Google said.

Originally Posted by Mistyck

I heard about this. I now get to change all my gmail passwords. Got to love it.

this aint just gmail... its any email provider.