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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."
Whether or not they are the good guys, laws that attempt to contravene physics are a bad idea. If the packets had been encrypted, it wouldn't have mattered that Google captured them--without the key, they're just noise. You could pass a law saying that capturing packets broadcast without encryption is illegal, or you could pass a law saying that if you want your packets to be private, you should encrypt them, and if you don't encrypt them, you have no expectation of privacy. Which of these two laws do you honestly think makes the most sense?
Normally wiretapping involves a deliberate act of bypassing some kind of lock, if only the lock on the box that contains the wires. Here there was no lock, and the packets were hitting the antenna without any special effort on Google's part, and Google did have a legitimate purpose in putting up the antenna and listening for packets. Yes, they got more packets than their legitimate purpose required. Maybe they did so deliberately, although I can't see any reason why that would have been useful to them. But making it illegal is a really expensive way to solve the problem, and it doesn't solve the fundamental problem, which is that people are sending their personal information over the network in the clear.
You make an excellent point.
For my part, I'd like to point out that if Google wanted to read your email, they wouldn't bother collecting wifi data. They'd just read yer fucking email.
It may well be that one day I paid with my c/c and you noted first two digits. Indeed nothing you can do with them. Next day I again paid with my c/c and you noted next two digits. Now it makes four. Next day ... [repeat until the logical end.] This is how you can get my entire c/c record. Any single observation is useless; but when combined they are very much useful.
Yep, which would require a concerted effort to gather the required data, not just a single drive-by capture of a small portion of your CC number. If I came back enough times, then yes, I could get the info, but why would I bother? If I were interested in your CC, I'd just copy down the whole damn thing the first time.
Anyway, if google wanted access to the data you were sending back-and-forth between your computer and router, it'd be pretty pointless for them to go grab a few dozen packets every couple weeks since the data is unlikely to be related. It would be like me coming over to your house every few weeks, writing down 2 numbers from a random document that you have lying around, and hoping to eventually construct a CC number from the jumble I've gathered. The CC analogy is a fun one, but doesn't really reflect the situation.
The society instead decided to prohibit all intercepts since they have hardly any social advantages to begin with.
If that were true, I could go to jail every time windows picks up a new access point.
Besides, there is an easy way to have an unlisted phone number.
There is an easy way to encrypt your packets.