howtothings.co.uk

Google admits to theft of users' computer passwords.

An inquiry was prompted when Google admitted that they had recorded users home computer passwords and emails during their Google Street view project. They confessed to downloading personal details from household wireless networks.

*Secure your network!!

Britain's privacy watchdog, the information commissioners office promised to look at what data the Internet search engine had gathered.

The countries that were effected haven't been confirmed but it's suspected that Britain is among them those that were.

Alan Eustace, a Google vice president said "We want to delete this data as soon as possible and I would like to apologise again."

Typical, they want EVERYTHING

Of course they got passwords, But I highly doubt they got passwords in plain text, more likely that it was jumbled in with everything else and the media are pushing it forward.

I have tutorials here that i've posted that can obtain SSL passwords. But they have passwords anyway, they own the internet!!

They were merely recording unencrypted digital radio broadcast data. I am sure nobody else has ever done such a thing, certainly nobody that posts in here.
@Drumm They certainly have clear text passwords, not just jumbles. There is a lot of info you can pull if you are sitting on the same subnet as another computer. With all the Python scripts Mark has gone through the trouble of writing for wardriving/spoofing etc, dare I say if you live nearby him and you have an open, or WEP protected wifi network you could probably call upon him if you forget your Facebook password.
Keep in mind these vehicles were generally on the move and they weren't parking intentionally targeting any specific person to mine data from. Those vehicles had A LOT of ground to cover, and the passwords that were captured were just an (in)convenient side effect.
Google isn't the first entity to do this and they won't be the last. Believe it or not we the technologically inclined are in the minority. Most of the people out there think that their wireless network connection is delivered by some kind of magical fairy dust. These people go buy a router, follow the picture setup in the box to plug everything in, grab their laptop and click on the "Linksys" network with the most "green thingies" next to it. They cross their fingers as they click on that big ass "e" on their desktop and poof their favorite homepage loads up! Yay! They think that when they hit that big red "x" on the the screen that their magical internet is turned off until they so boldly go and click on their big ass "e" again. These are the majority of people, ignorant to a fault. When someone like Google comes along and "steals" their magical wireless fairy dust it is time to stone them for practicing black magic! They want to blame someone else for their own ignorance. What else is new in the world today?

@Pack3t, I meant more, they weren't specifically looking for passwords. It's just part of the data they sniffed.