Privacy has become a growing concern all round the inter-webs and even the big guns like Google and Facebook are now forced to re-view their privacy policies. In times like these, you really don’t want Google to say something as silly as “We made a blunder” when it comes to public’s privacy.

While reviewing and auditing the data collected by the Street View cars, Google found that it has been ‘mistakenly’ collecting private data like snippets of email, web history, text, pictures, etc. from open networks the cars encountered enroute. What’s more strange is that, the roots of the problem lie back in 2006 and nobody noticed it.

Alan Eustace, Senior VP of Engg. and Research at Google, said,

[We have] been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open networks. Maintaining people’s trust is crucial to everything we do, and in this case we fell short. The engineering team at Google works hard to earn your trust – and we are acutely aware that we failed badly here. An engineer working on an experimental wi-fi project wrote a piece of code that sampled all categories of publicly broadcast wi-fi data [and] quite simply, it was a mistake.

The Head of communications, Peter Barron apologized for the issue on BBC News.

Google is maniacally obsessed with data and the incident proved it one more time. On the other hand, it’s also a wake up call for those who use open wi-fi networks and keep their privacy at stake.