37 States Join Investigation of Google Street View

bonch writes "Attorneys General from 37 states have joined the probe into Google's Street View data collection. The investigation seeks more information behind Google's software testing and data archiving practices after it was discovered that their Street View vans scanned private WLANs and recorded users' MAC addresses. Attorney general Richard Blumenthal said, 'Google's responses continue to generate more questions than they answer. Now the question is how it may have used — and secured — all this private information.'"

Comments

Re:Hmm.

[Lars T.]

"the unwarranted collection of e-mails, passwords and other personal data of those who failed to protect their networks with passwords."

Sure, the data wasn't protected in any way, and it was broadcast in public - but why store it, if all you want is the MAC Address and the SSID. And why would you then claim that all you stored is exactly that and nothing more until it comes out that wasn't the case?

because the proceessing of the data(SSID/macaddr is in each packet, and gps location and time) is done offline? or it's kept in case the "beta" software may crash if it encounters a packet type that it wasn't expecting, or.... provide me a good theroy of something they could have gotten, and what they could do with it. gmail uses SSL, VPNing to work will protect your work e-mail as will the use of encryption in outlook, setup by the IT guy[s] at work.

The first one I don't buy for a millisecond (more than it takes to process a wireless frame), you wait until a beacon frames comes in, and bamm you have all the information you need. There is no need to store anything else - unless that's what you are after. It's as simple as that. And that bit about "beta" software - those functions have been done over and over by others, is Google couldn't make such a trivial task work before the first Street View car left the yard, they are in the wrong business.

Listen, it's easy, you don't store stuff that takes up many times as much storage as what you say what you are looking for, unless you intend to use that for - whatever. And I want to know what that was, from Google.