Andre Yoskowitz
10 Mar 2013 17:27
Google will soon be settling with the attorneys general representing 30 American states over the accusation that its Street View cars collected data from unsecured Wi-Fi networks during their travels.
The search giant will pay $7 million to be distributed amongst the states.
A settlement will be a long time coming as the case was brought in 2010. The so called "WiSpy" case referred to data collected between 2007 and 2010.
At first, Google denied collecting any data before flipping and admitting they had collected by accident. Later in the case, they admitted that the system was built by a "rogue engineer" and they still had payload data.
Google has always said it did nothing with the data: "We work hard to get privacy right at Google. But in this case we didn't, which is why we quickly tightened up our systems to address the issue."