The investigation showed that Google mapped private users’ wireless networks in several European countries. Among other things, Google was accused of having collected users’ IP addresses and their so-called mac addresses, which are used to identify individual network cards.
Last Friday, Google admitted that the company collected detailed information about users in Europe. This despite the fact that Google first denied the data last month.
In addition to having collected basic information about open wireless networks, Google has also intercepted the content of the traffic that takes place over the wireless networks. Something that Google claimed on Friday was due to a mistake.
– In 2006, one of our technicians worked on an experimental project about wireless networks that involved collecting data about public and open wireless networks. When we started collecting data about open wireless networks a year later, the old code was still there and we registered the users’ traffic by mistake, writes Google in a blog post on Friday.
Google states that as soon as the company discovered that it had collected more information than was intended, all Google cars that collected the data were stopped. Google has also taken the decision to completely shut down the project and stop collecting information about wireless networks.
IDG News