Report confirms Google Wi-Fi code recorded data

From CNET News.com: A third-party review of the code used by Google that collected personal data during its Street View Wi-Fi analysis project didn't produce a smoking gun but didn't put Google in the clear either.

Stroz Friedberg produced the 21-page report, a copy of which we've hosted on our site (click for PDF). Google paid for the report through its law firm, Perkins Coie, as part of an internal investigation into how Google Street View cars were allowed to collect data from unsecured wireless networks for three years, which has Google in hot water all around the globe.

The report confirms that Google's code (known as "gslite") was set to discard data gathered from encrypted wireless networks but record data gathered from unsecured networks. Google, like other companies such as Skyhook Wireless, recorded wireless hot-spot information to help improve the quality of online mapping services by matching the location of those hot spots with known GPS coordinates. But Google's software took things a step much further in actually writing "payload" data--fragments of actual user data--to a hard drive instead of just recording SSID and MAC address data.

The question is whether or not Google and/or the engineer who wrote the code intended all along to capture this type of personal data for use inside Google, something the company has denied.

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