Wi - Fi traffic intercepted by Google ’s Street View cars include passwords and Es - mail , grant to the French National Commission on Computing and Liberty ( CNIL ) .
CNIL launch an investigation last calendar month intoGoogle ’s transcription of dealings carried over unencrypted Wi - Fi networks , and has begun examining the data Google handed over as part of that investigation .
Google give away on May 14 that the fleet of vehicle it operates to compile panoramic image of city streets for its Google Maps website had unknowingly memorialise traffic from unencrypted Wi - Fi networks . Google ’s intention was only to enter the identity and office of Wi - Fi hotspots in parliamentary procedure to power a location table service it maneuver , the company say . However , the software it used to record that information went much further , intercepting and storing data packets too .
At the time , Google said it only collected “ fragments ” of personal Web dealings as it passed by , because its Wi - Fi equipment automatically interchange channel five times a second . However , with Wi - Fi networks operate on at up to 54 M bits per second , it always seemed likely that those one - fifth part of a second recording would contain more than just “ fragment ” of personal data .
That has now been confirm by CNIL , which since June 4 has been examine Wi - Fi traffic and other data provided by Google on two hard disks and over a secure data connection to its server .
“ It ’s still too former to say what will happen as a outcome of this investigation , ” CNIL said Thursday .
“ However , we can already tell that [ … ] Google did indeed record e - mail access passwords [ and ] extracts of the mental object of e - mail messages , ” CNIL said .
datum protective cover authority in Spain and Germany have also asked Google for approach to Wi - Fi traffic data stop in their country , but the CNIL was the first to have its request granted , it said .
Google also told CNIL that the data collected by the Street View cable car is also used by other services , include Google Maps and Google Latitude , which permit exploiter automatically transmit their location to friends , and to cover others who take to divvy up their location via the service .
That ’s of interest to CNIL , because Google has still not made the necessary statutory resolve regarding its processing of personal data for the Latitude service in France .
