Google co-founder Sergey Brin says the company "screwed up" when it equipped its world-roving Street View cars with software code that spent three years capturing personal data from open Wi-Fi networks.
"Let me just say: We screwed up," Brin told a room full of reporters this afternoon at the company's annual developer conference in San Francisco. "I'm not going to make excuses about this."

In a blog post on Friday, Google announced that contrary to previous assurances by the company, its Street View cars had been capturing payload data from open Wi-Fi networks as they sped around the globe snapping digital photos. Just a month earlier the company had said the cars were collecting only SSIDs and MAC addresses from Wi-Fi networks.

The Friday post said that the company's mobile team included payload-capturing code in the cars' software despite the fact that the project leaders "did not want, and had no intention of using, payload data". It called this "a mistake".

The company also said that it would delete the data and that it would no longer collect any Wi-Fi data via the cars.

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