A Google Street View car, photographed by Gabriele Peloso. (Credit: Gabriele Peloso/dnakiller)

Almost everyone is familiar with the Street View selection on Google Maps: type in your own address in the Google map, select the Street View, and see a fairly clear view of your home that you can twist and tweak and rotate to see the rest of your neighborhood.  Kinda cool – kinda creepy.

Well now Google is admitting that while the Google Camera Cars were photographing your neighborhood, it may also have been scouring your airwaves collecting information on unsecured Wi-Fi network activity.  Oops.

According to a Cnet report in May, Google admitted in April to collecting the publicly broadcast information while using the Street View cars, but that it it didn’t ”collect payload data“.

But they are now singing a different tune. According to Google:  ”It’s now clear that we have been mistakenly collecting samples of payload data from open (i.e. non-password-protected) Wi-Fi networks, even though we never used that data in any Google products,” Alan Eustace, senior vice president for engineering and research, wrote in the blog post.

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A Canadian filmmaker is on his way to realizing an age-long dream of becoming like The Six Million Dollar Man from his childhood TV shows.

Blinded in one eye from an accident when Rob Spence was a boy; he had the damaged eye removed a few years ago so he could wear a prosthetic eye, which looks like a normal eye. He noticed that the tiny camera in his cellphone could probably fit into the prosthesis, and thought, “why not?” Scientists agree with Spencer, and have been looking into ways to not only implant a tiny camera that can record video, but to someday have the ability to be wired to a blind person’s brain enabling them with sight.

We first told you about Rob Spence and the this new device back in December, and now the final tests on implanting Rob Spence’s empty eye-socket with a tiny camera will proceed within about a month. Being a filmmaker, Rob wants to see how close to “true” reality he can come by just recording ordinary day-to-day conversations and events without his subject’s being turned off by a regular camera.

However, since he’s a real filmmaker, Spence would expect to be on the up-and-up, and not try any weird stuff that could be considered morally, ethically, or legally out of the circle of decency.
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