Google apologises for collecting personal data

Google recently accepted that its world-roving Street View cars have been collecting information sent over open WiFi networks. Only those which were not password protected were accessed and their information was captured. This was inspite of a previous confirmation by the company that this product was not doing anything of the kind and that the data collected was free from any data available even freely.

Now is the time when Google is bearing the brunt of being big. No one gives a damn if some new start up starts collecting personal data. But if google collects personal data, it becomes news. I feel sad and happy about it. It reminds me of the difficulties which the large corporations have to face for everything they do. It also reminds of the importance of openness which the technology world so much requires.

This is not the first time that google has faced heat because of being accused of 'keeping personal data' or being responsible/medium for something wrong being done on the internet. Having a huge product line, it is tough to check each and every one of the million lines of code to ensure that they don't break a plethora of the multiple national and international obligations marking the monitoring of the web world. No wonder google missed it.
But the way google has put out the mistake makes me feel like I am watching one of those cartoon strips on computer/information technology profession.
I will produce it here verbatim from the g-blog for the readers:

"So how did this happen? Quite simply, it was a mistake. In 2006 an engineer working on an experimental WiFi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast WiFi data. A year later, when our mobile team started a project to collect basic WiFi network data like SSID information and MAC addresses using Google’s Street View cars, they included that code in their software—although the project leaders did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data."

So one, just one Software Engineer, is able to make his piece of code which copies personal data through so many checks of the google quality bar?? For novices, it is one of the major milestones in any company to ensure that the software is not collecting any personal data without the end user's consent. Hats off to your engineering process :) No wonder most of their products remain in Beta, while the number of such instances of accusation and proofs against google are growing.