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FCC Investigating Google Street View Wi-Fi Data Collection
adeelarshad82 writes "The Federal Communications Commission is looking into whether Google's Street View Wi-Fi data collection violated the Communications Act. At issue is a May admission from Google that equipment attached to its Street View cars collected data that was traveling over unencrypted Wi-Fi networks, known as payload data. At first Google said it did not know if that data included personally identifiable information, but the company admitted last month that it did include entire e-mail addresses, URLs, and passwords. Google has pledged to work with the FCC."
Access point MACs, signal strength, and latitude / longitude coordinates gives you a geolocation database you can use to calculate your position via WiFi, ie: skyhook.
Having played with Kismet (which is what Google is using), it seems to me that it's really easy to accidentally capture packet payloads. Kismet will dump payloads in to handy pcaps by default.
Wardriving generally sucks for data capture. It's good for surveying (its interesting to see the proliferation of WAPs and secured APs at that... and some people choose really amusing SSIDs). But driving around alters signal strength which means losing packets. You're also channel hopping which means losing packets. If you really want to log people's data, you wardrive first to identify targets then come back and listen to just that (or a very small subset) of targets.