Fran Foo | The Australian
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.
