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Google Apologizes For Collecting Too Much WiFi Data—And Then Gives Up

Written by Frank Hayes
May 17th, 2010
Pushing the envelope is risky, but no one makes any progress without doing it. Google rediscovered that reality when it had to apologize this week after accidentally capturing a lot more WiFi data than it intended for the Street View feature of Google Maps.

The upshot: The search giant has now decided to end its entire WiFi survey. And that's exactly the wrong lesson to learn from an incident like this.

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Posted in CRM, E-Commerce, In-Store, IT Strategy/Industry, Mobile/Wireless/Contactless, Premium Content, Security/Fraud, Software
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One Comment | Read Google Apologizes For Collecting Too Much WiFi Data—And Then Gives Up

  1. A reader Says:
    May 20th, 2010 at 8:36 am

    That’s a bold statement. Did you sit in on all the internal Google meetings, weighing this decision? Did you study ways to potentially monetize this data versus the legal risk and public outcry of keeping it?

    What makes you think you have studied this decision so well that Google must obviously be wrong?

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