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The Australian
June 08, 2010
GOOGLE has denied suggestions by Communications Minister Stephen Conroy that its Street Viewcars inadvertently captured people's personal banking details.
Senator Conroy yesterday suggested that Google could have gathered financial information when its cars accessed private data through unsecured wireless networks. The data collection occurred while the cars were out gathering information for Google's mapping service.
"(If) you were doing a banking transaction, or transmitting personal information, they could have hoovered it up, sucked it up into their machine," he told ABC TV yesterday.
"What we want to ensure now is that we get access to the information that's been collected.
"We want to know where it's stored, we want to know what the information is, and importantly we want to ensure that Google don't destroy this information."
But Google Australia said no banking data was collected because it could not read information transmitted over secure networks like a financial website. A Google spokeswoman explained that Street View cars did not keep encrypted data.
"The way it works is that the equipment we use (which we bought from a third party) and our software will recognise encrypted transmissions, but immediately discards that encrypted data.
"If you have an open network, but are using a website that is itself protected by secure socket layer (security) or some other form of encryption, then the software may have stored that data, but we are not able to read it," she said. "Banking is a form of encrypted data. We did not collect information travelling over secured wireless networks.
"Despite the fact that we have not used this data in any Google products, this was a serious mistake for which we are profoundly sorry," she said.
Google has halted its Street View cars from operating in Australia. On Sunday federal Attorney-General Robert McClelland said the matter had been referred to the Australian Federal Police.
http://www.theaustralian.com.au/politics/google-denies-capturing-banking-details/story-e6frgczf-1225876667684
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