Google Admits to Collecting Emails, Passwords, Institutes Tougher Policies

Google's WiFi data collection mishap continues to unfold. Just as Canada ended its investigation and said that Google did indeed breach privacy laws, Google is officially admitting that full emails, URLs and passwords were gathered by its cars. The company is also instituting some tougher privacy policies internally.

"[A] number of external regulators have inspected the data as part of their investigations (seven of which have now been concluded),"  Alan Eustace, Senior VP, Engineering & Research at Google, wrote. 

"It’s clear from those inspections that while most of the data is fragmentary, in some instances entire emails and URLs were captured, as well as passwords," he added. 

"We want to delete this data as soon as possible, and I would like to apologize again for the fact that we collected it in the first place," he said.

The fact that this type of data was gathered was revealed by several government agencies following their investigations. Google did not analyze the data itself and was unable to say for sure what type of data was collected.

With the amount of data that was acquired in the 30 countries where the service operated, sensitive information was bound to have been gathered even if most of the data is heavily fragmented.

Google is now issuing new internal policies that it hopes will help it and its employees handle private data better and is also making several other changes with the same purpose.

"[W]e’ve spent the past several months looking at how to strengthen our internal privacy and security practices, as well as talking to external regulators globally about possible improvements to our policies," Eustace said.

Alma Whitten has been appointed as director of privacy for both the engineering and the product management teams at Google. She has been working for Google for the past two years as head of privacy issues for engineering.

She will have a larger team and will work on making all Google products handle private data better.

The amount of training on privacy issues will also be increased for all Google employees which will be required to undertake more privacy guidance programs.

Finally, internal policies will be strengthened and each project will be required to have a privacy design document to showcase how the specific product handles the issues.