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Google Street View Wi-Fi Data Includes Passwords, Email Content
snydeq writes "The French National Commission on Computing and Liberty has found passwords and email messages among the Street View Wi-Fi data Google intercepted, InfoWorld reports. The data protection authority has been investigating Google's recording of traffic carried over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks. Google has said it collected only 'fragments' of personal web traffic as it passed by because its Wi-Fi equipment automatically changes channels five times a second. With Wi-Fi networks operating at up to 54Mbps, however, those 'fragments' may have been more than that. 'We can already state that [...] Google did indeed record email access passwords [and] extracts of the content of email messages,' CNIL said."
You're right of course. But it still isn't a good look for Google. A lot of countries have fairly strict laws against this kind of thing, and the "if it was private it should have been secured" argument isn't a valid excuse, legally speaking.
A crapload of small random bits of data will contain some interesting data.. This is news?
If you don't want anyone picking up your wifi traffic you encrypt it. Welcome to the year 2000.
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups.
that this would end up being less about Google getting in trouble for scraping unsecured data and more about educating the general public on how to secure their networks. Aside from the fact that Google probably shouldn't have done it in the first place, this should be wake up call to everyone with an unsecured wireless network.
It wasn't intercepted between the sender and recipient.
The sender sent it to the recipient, AND ALSO broadcast it, over the air, in the clear, to anybody who cared to listen.
Perhaps not, but I don't think Google should be faulted for obtaining what is essentially information being made public. Now, if they were doing things like cracking somebody's WPA-protected (or hell, even WEP) wireless signals, then yes, they should be.
Analogy time....say somebody is in their front yard, holding up a big sign that has their "my bank password is xxx". Should someone passing by in the street get shit for looking over and noticing that?
No. Google's had one consistent message from the beginning: this was an accident, and it's extremely unlikely that they collected more than fragments because they were DRIVING DOWN THE FUCKING STREET as they channel-hopped.
So out of many gigabytes of accidentally-collected data, yes, it's not particularly surprising that there are a few passwords collected from people still crazy enough to send that kind of stuff unencrypted. Tell me, what exactly do you think Google's nefarious motive in all this could possibly be? What's your plan to make money by doing this deliberately?
If you have no reasonable answer, as I'm sure you don't, then fuck off with your cutesy little insinuations.
Those people were transmitting those passwords and e-mails in the clear over a broadcast medium (ie. to everybody in range who was listening). Google was in range and listening and heard them. That's like saying "I was shouting my password at the top of my lungs on the streetcorner and someone overheard me and wrote it down!": yes there's a problem, but it's not with the person who wrote the password down. It's with you, for thinking you can shout things in public and somehow miraculously have them remain private and confidential.
The law doesn't care.
Stop thinking about your Wifi device. You emit a lot of information without knowing about it anyway. Read about TEMPEST.
Some people even believe that just cause they have swapped CRTs with LCDs, they are not vulnerable. They are usually wrong.
There are way many things that are private to you, but that anyone can collect on a mass scale and raise hairs. Like the time period during which your home's lights are on, and when they are off, the contents of your trash, what type of car you use, what colors/types of clothes you wear, etc. just by noticing you in public. Not all such information may be useful or cost-worthy to use today, but it's all information that says something about you.
Banu
It's more like yelling at your neighbor across the street, and then getting upset when someone driving by overhears it. With unencrypted traffic on a wireless network you are quite literally broadcasting information to the world. The argument that someone is the intended recipient and everyone else needs to pretend they didn't hear it is bullshit.
Much, if not most, of polite human society throughout history is based on pretending you didn't overhear coversations between people. Listening in on other people's conversations, even when those conversations are in a public space, is creepy and wrong. The fact that you think your argument supports your position is the kind of thinking that gives geeks a bad name for being, well, creepy and wrong.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
It's more like walking through a crowded mall with your camcorder running to video something.
As you pass people you pick up random snatches a second or 2 long from their conversations as well
You don't give a shit about what they're saying, why should you?
but you still pick up tiny selections of private conversation.
now all the nutjobs decide that you've violated the privacy of all the people talking loudly in a public place just like if you'd tapped their phones and try to get criminal charges pressed against you.
Exactly - I'm baffled that Google didn't see this coming. The fact that "enough people" are freaking out in many different communities and cultures is evidence that Google did something socially unacceptable in a broad way. I don't understand how an advertising company could have such a tin ear.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.