Street View cars, used to collect data for location-based products like Google Maps, mistakenly collected samples of payload data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks.
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"Meanwhile, I welcome the fact that the Wi-Fi payload data that should never have been collected in the first place can, at last, be deleted, " he said.
Google admitted its vehicles inadvertently captured so-called payload data but said it contained only fragments of content, according to the Information Commissioner's Office, which examined the data in August.
An internal email recounted a conversation in which the engineer "openly discussed his review of payload data with a senior manager of the Street View project, " the report stated.
The FTC said Google promised it had not and would not use the payload data -- though unlike the case in Britain, Google did not promise to delete the information.
One of the lawyers bringing a class action suit against Google alleges that the company filed a patent for using the sort of payload data it collected, proving that this was no accident.
It says the unnamed engineer wrote computer code to collect "payload data" including personal email, text messages, passwords, Internet-usage history and other personal information that was moving through unencrypted Wi-Fi networks within range of the Street View vehicles between 2008 and 2010.
From there, the data go to NASA's Payload Operations Integration Center at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.
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In the text payload, a section called UDH (User Data Header) is optional but defines lot of advanced features not all mobiles are compatible with.
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During the STS-134 mission, and for the first several months afterward, about 40 members of the AMS team monitored the experiment and analyzed the data it sent down from the Payload Operations Control Center at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston.
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Virgin estimates that each flight of SpaceShip Two can hold 1, 300 pounds of scientific payload, and the rack setup will include window access for the collection of spectrographic and other data.
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