Google admits it's collected snippets of people’s online activities sent over unprotected or unsecured Wi-Fi networks during the past four years. With a nation already worried about privacy concerns, Google's admission raise continued worries about potential privacy breaches, while Google continues to gather volumes of personal information about people, via its search engine and other Google brand services.
The when and where: apparently Google collected and picked up fragments of transmitted e-mails and Web addresses during the time that its cars were physically on the streets, photographing neighborhoods for the “Street View” feature, that zooms in on houses and businesses. Google claims that it only recently discovered that it possesses an accumulation of about 600 gigabytes of data that was transmitted over public Wi-Fi networks, collected from more than 30 countries. While Google claims that none of the information has appeared in its search engine or other services, no comment on possibilities for which the company may utilize that collected data.