Google Street View cars back on the road

[Lite]

Google has given its Street View cars the green light to hit the streets and start snapping photos again, after spending the past few months parked over the Wi-Fi data debacle.

In May, Google admitted its camera cars were collecting Wi-Fi data as they drove around cities taking snaps for the Street View photo service in Google Maps. Along with that Wi-Fi data, Google also picked up personal information from unsecured connections, which the firm claims was unintentional.

The Street View cars are now back in business, but without any Wi-Fi detection equipment on board. "Our cars will no longer collect any Wi-Fi information at all, but will continue to collect photos and 3D imagery as they did before," said Brian McClendon, vice president of engineering for Google Geo, in a blog post, taking care to stress that Microsoft's Bing is also collecting such photos for its mapping service.

"We recognise that serious mistakes were made in the collection of Wi-Fi payload data, and we have worked to quickly rectify them," he added.

Starting next week, the cars will first head to Ireland, Norway, South Africa and Sweden.

Google has faced investigations and legal challenges across Europe and the US over the Wi-Fi data collection, with the Met Police looking into the case in the UK.

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[avmad]

Google street disgusts me. :angry: When did I give permission for a very close up view of my house and garden, and whole surrounding area to be broadcast for ANYONE with internet access to view?

I can go look into peoples houses to see what goodies I could steal. Go look for any car that wants stealing. Google sucks, what happened to privacy.

Sure theres some funny stuff to see, but this is well out of order imo. Time google were made to pay for all this crap :bruce: