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Why Google's Wi-Fi Payload Collection Was Inadvertent
Reader Lauren Weinstein found a blog post that gives a good, fairly technical explanation of why Google's collection of Wi-Fi payload data was incidental, and why it's easy to collect Wi-Fi payload data accidentally in the course of mapping Wi-Fi access points. "Although some people are suspicious of their explanation, Google is almost certainly telling the truth when it claims it was an accident. The technology for Wi-Fi scanning means it's easy to inadvertently capture too much information, and be unaware of it. ... It's really easy to protect your data: simply turn on WPA. This completely stops Google (or anybody else) from spying on your private data. ... Laws against this won't stop the bad guys (hackers). They will only unfairly punish good guys (like Google) whenever they make a mistake. ... [A]nybody who has experience in Wi-Fi mapping would believe Google. Data packets help Google find more access-points and triangulate them, yet the payload of the packets do nothing useful for Google because they are only fragments."
Of course it was accidental, after all, their corporate slogan is "Do no evil". Obviously they wouldn't do anything that would be evil.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Inadvertent or not Google broke laws in some countries. Accidentally breaking the law doesn't eliminate responsibility or culpability - even if people shouldn't have left their WiFi unsecured.
If I accidentally run over someone with my car because I wasn't paying attention to what I was doing, it doesn't absolve me of the liability - even if that old lady had it coming, er, was jaywalking.
Laws won't stop the bad guys, but if you have laws you can at least punish them if you catch them. Claiming Google are the good guys (based on what? their motto?) and saying therefore there should not be laws is just ridiculous.
If you're broadcast your data via radio, why on earth would you expect anyone to consider it private?
Encryption. If you need it, use it.
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
So what TFA is saying is that the issue isn't simply Google snooping on networks and collecting data? And that there may have been a legitimate reason for this whole situation? And that it's blown out of proportion? STOP RUINING MY REASONS TO BE ANGRY AT GOOGLE!
My concern with what Google, and many other firms, are doing is that they are dedicated huge amounts of resources to collected huge amount of data on people. As profit making entities, these firms must at some point monetize this data to get a return on investment. Therefore, if google is keeping data other than basic acces point information, then they must be planning to do something with it.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Pretending that WPA provides security should be illegal too.
Any geek worth their salt also never makes mistakes. Myself, I think I made a mistake once many years ago, and for my negligence i was rightfully whipped for it. Now of course I never make them; my work is always perfect.
The thing most people forget to ask, but was asked in this article, is something you conveniently forgot to mention. Here it is:
What possible use could google have for this data? What would be their motive here?
As the article says, there's almost no personal data in the emails. Even if there is, there's so little of it that what useful purpose could it serve? You'd have a hard time correlating it to any one person, or even finding out what it is. There's going to be so little data here, and it'll be so fragmented, that turning it into anything useful would be impossible.
On the other hand, why would google risk collecting this data when they knew what was going to happen if it got out? The risk vs. reward here just doesn't make sense. They're going to risk their reputation on... what? Collecting a few fragments of unencrypted wifi traffic that probably contains so little information and could very well be generated by a bot running on your machine.
I'm not going to believe google did this on purpose until someone can give me a motive that doesn't sound like something from a UFO convention.
You do, ensure that it's broadcast power is low enough so as not to escape the walls of your dwelling, and encrypt the traffic (WPA2 preferably).
No privacy was violated, it's not like the guy in van drove up the to the house, and shoved an antenna though the mail slot. I mean this is like complaining the guy making a movie in his backyard recorded your shouting over his fence, don't shout then!
All of the above was encrypted with a Quad ROT-13 method. Unauthorized decryption is in violation of the DMCA.
No, this is complaining that they are identifying that you have an access point at all and then (presumably) making that information publicly available. Setting the power so the signal doesn't escape the house - while still reaching all areas of the house - is not practical. It also puts the onus on you to "hide" rather than on them to obtain permission before publicizing information about you. As for your analogy, I think this is a better one: this is like them driving up beside your house and looking in the windows with binoculars and then publicising to the world the contents of your house.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
I think what is more likely is that someone came to the engineer and said they needed to get the data and nobody really bothered to think of the privacy concern since it was going to be used internally anyway. Sure, if the engineer was told that the requirements demanded better privacy, he could have stripped the payloads, but if someone asked you to just get the data, it's less likely you'd think of that as a problem.
I would redefine it as sloth on the part of the management for not considering the issues, as opposed to lazy engineers.
Your ends-justifies-the-means concept holds no water.
My wifi access points are a matter of public knowledge. After all-- they're freaking radios. What's not public knowledge is anything after the location of it, and its authentication- if any.
The data that flows there is mine, and no one elses. The other MAC addresses associated with the AP are also my business, and no one else's. Differing jurisdictions have different views of the severity of the theft that their mindlessly-stupid shark-like gobbling did. I hope they suffer the higher of the common denominators of justice.
At the time of this writing, the parent post is marked "Troll".
How is this trolling? Consequentialism is a valid thing to argue against. Granted, you may disagree with parent's opinion of what is and is not a private component of a Wi-Fi transmission. If you disagree with him that a violation has occurred then you would necessarily also disagree that Google should suffer legal action from any sort of justice system. If that's the case, then the respectable non-cowardly way to handle it is to argue against it and take him to task.
I'll spell this out since a lot of mods clumsily fail to grasp a few basic concepts. "Troll" is something of an accusation or judgment. That doesn't change because you express it by selecting it from a menu rather than directly confronting the poster. As such, it requires at least some kind of positive indication. Specifically, it would require a good reason to believe that the parent poster could not conceivably express the above as a sincere opinion and is saying it merely to get a reaction out of others. There is no such indication here.
This reminds me of too many Apple discussions, in which the fanboyism towards $popular_company is stronger than the love of free speech or the ability to handle opinions with which you disagree. I don't particularly care so much about the waste of a perfectly good mod point. Rather, the hypocrisy is what needs to be pointed out.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
Your selective quoting and attempted sarcasm are rather pointless since I was merely pointing out the flaw in the suggestion I received. But your attempt at wit is noted.
As for your analogy, it is not apt. Let me fix it for you:
"If you want to get to the library, go down Main Street and take a left at the house that has a big screen TV and large leather couch in the living room."
Either you get that privacy is being increasingly encroached upon and that encroachment is a problem, or you don't. You don't seem to get that so I really see no point in further "discussion" with you (and wouldn't anyway since you seem to need to massage your ego by attempted wit and sarcasm). If it will make you feel better go ahead and have the last word. Make it a four letter one if you like.
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
That would make sense if Google wrote all of the code themselves. However, they used many off-the-shelf, open-source tools to perform their data collection.
The defaults in those tools is to grab all the frames. So, the guy who put together the tools (who probably was not a privacy-minded person) says "It works great! We have the data that we want, see?" and shows the finished product to his boss. The boss, who might have been more privacy-minded, probably looked at the finished product and saw no personal information, and gave it a checkmark. Completely missing the intermediate data product that no one was using.