Washington, July 12: Google’s “Street View” cars will return to the road next week but all wireless scanning equipment has been removed after a controversy over the collection of private information.
Google said on Friday that the camera-equipped cars, which drive around taking photographs for the Internet giant’s free online mapping service, would resume operating in four countries next week and in others later.
“Having spoken to the relevant regulators, we have decided to start Street View driving in Ireland, Norway, South Africa and Sweden again starting next week,” Brian McClendon, a Google vice president of engineering, said in a blog post.
“We expect to add more countries in time.”
Google grounded all Street View cars in May after disclosing that they had mistakenly gathered snippets of private data sent over unsecured wireless networks.
The Mountain View, California-based search and advertising titan is facing lawsuits and investigations in a number of countries in connection with private wireless data collected by Street View cars.
According to Google, Street View cars taking photographs of cities in more than 30 countries inadvertently gathered fragments of personal information, so-called payload data, sent over unsecured Wi-Fi systems.
McClendon said the cars “will no longer collect any Wi-Fi information at all, but will continue to collect photos and 3D imagery as they did before”.
–Agencies