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Google Audits Street View Data Systems
schliz writes "Google's plans to upgrade to high-definition Street View in Australia are on hold until it completes a rigorous internal audit of the processes, it announced today. The company is currently being investigated by international regulators about possible privacy breaches when it became known that its Street View vehicles were capturing not only publicly available SSIDs and MAC addresses, but also samples of payload data transmitted over these networks."
While I'm not an expert on security or privacy, it seems to me like "publicly available" should mean that they didn't gather any data that citizens weren't openly broadcasting anyway. From an ethical perspective, it's shaky at best, but it's probably a huge difference legally.
I'm not endorsing Google's collection, but aren't people who openly broadcast their data be at least *a little* at fault here?
My other sig is clever.
Compared to Google, BP is the mom and pop grocery on the corner.
In what world do you live in? BP is a $246 billion dollar global energy company. In comparison, Google is a dinky little $24 billion dollar company. Not to mention how BP has 4.5 times as many employees. One can go on and on about how your characterization is plainly wrong.
This entire wireless thing is total BS. From what I have read, they were using kismet for their wireless collection program. and if they were channel hopping like any good war-driver I assure you they were not around long enough to get anything useful. (DNS,netbios,MDNS packets etc) All of it was open to begin with and all ready up for grabs. most people know what they are buying now when they get an AP that is not setup properly (Big warning stickers printed on box for setup).
Market cap is not synonymous with the size of a company. BP has 10x the yearly revenue and 4.5x as many employees as Google. It is the far larger company.