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Google Grabbed Locations of Phones, PCs
1800maxim writes "As it turns out, Google didn't only grab the hotspot SSIDs and MAC addresses with its Street View cars. As this article at CNET notes, Google also recorded location data of computers using wireless cards, as well as cell phones and other Wi-Fi devices. Google's explanation is that the data collection was accidental, and they declined to answer further questions from CNET."
And Teh Google OWNZ You !!
Somehow, I don't expect this to create the same outrage as back when Apple did something similar...
I don't think this activity is limited to 'street view' cars - I don't live in a country where there are any roaming the city at all, yet every mac address for all the access points I own can be located by entering them in to sites like: http://samy.pl/androidmap/index.php
I would assume Android is the culprit here. I expect Google buried some lawyer speak deep in an EULA making this activity perfectly legal. I'm not okay with it though.
Did Google forget about the "don't be evil" thing?
Yes, your honour. I swear the collection of those purses was purely accidental.
Google's business is built on having data about people. Google drives around and collects even more data about people from personal WiFi hotspots, PC WiFi cards, and phones. Only the truly naive can possibly believe this is accidental. The whole "big clumsy cuddly bear stumbling around doing silly things" excuse is getting very old, Google. Stop playing us for stupid.
they work for the NSA
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
We've already heard the method they were using for capturing MAC addresses and how sloppy it was. We already knew they were collecting random packets, then truncating them to include the MAC Address and a small portion of the payload and then saving them. We know some of those payloads include packets sent by people GASP on their phones or laptops, therefore it stands to reason some of the MAC addresses must also be from those phones and laptops. We knew this months and months and months ago, but apparently CNET didn't make the connection so easily.
It's like we just keep rehashing the same old story over and over and over because nobody understood it the first time, and someone comes and puts a new spin on old data and suddenly it lives again. The thing is, you can change a registry key and change your MAC address. There's no big table of data somewhere that connects your MAC address to specific person. It's not even remotely the same as an IP address. Oh sure, you can say "Hey the MAC address of this device on my network matches the one on my network yesterday" but not "Hey, that's my neighbors MAC address" unless you've got some sort of access to the device in question.
So Google may know that a certain device was one place and also another place, but that's about the extent of the correlations they can really make with this data. Again, just as before, there's no reason to assume malice when sloppy coding is much more logical explanation. Google has nothing to gain and much to lose (PR-wise) by doing something like this on purpose, and a very reasonable and believable explanation was offered. Conspiracy theorists can continue to beat this dead horse if they like, but I'm an Occam's razor fan.
Why is this new? The StreetView cards were set to promiscuous mode, since they sniffed data packets not intended for them. It stands to reason they recorded responses from the end devices too, not just the AP->device traffic.
Hyperbole: I use it liberally!
So we have had Google's explanation for what happened, and how a coder got lazy and just modified some existing packet capture software (which captured all packets, instead of just the ones used by networks to announce themselves). Rather than actually writing some simple routines to select which packets to record and properly remove all the payload data, he simply let it record every packet with *most* of it truncated. This left the MAC address and sometimes a portion of the payload data behind.
We all knew all this months and months ago. We knew that some of the payload data came from people using their computers/laptops/phones on WiFi networks. Does it take a super genius to realize that if they packets came from phones/laptops, and the payloads came from phones/laptops, that some of the MAC addresses might also come from those same phones/laptops? This is the same story once again rehashed and repackaged. There's absolutely 0 new information here. CNET might not have realized this was eminently obvious with the details of the original story, but most technically oriented people did.
And honestly, it's not that big of a deal. Your MAC address can't be traced back to you. It's more or less anonymous. Unless somebody has had access to your device, there's no way to tie the MAC address to you--and if that prospect concerns you, just change it. In Windows it's just a simple registry tweak to make your MAC address anything you want.
People keep saying that it was lazy coding, but how can that be right?
If you want to get the locations of access points, do you
a) write (or use) a program that records the SSID broadcasts and their location
-or-
b) write (or use) a program that captures all the traffic, truncates the frames, processes them to extract the access point broadcasts and then stores them with the location?
Hint : option 'a' is the easy one.
I do not see how option 'b' is something that can be done accidentally without a lot of extra effort.
...but shouldn't the real story be about how much information your gadgets are just leaking all over the place? Google didn't break into people's homes and write down the MAC addresses of every piece of tech they could find, they just recorded what was already being blasted through the airwaves. Now, I'm not saying this makes it all ok, but at least we KNOW Google is doing it - what's to stop other companies/groups/individuals from doing the same? The real issue is that the information is out there, not that someone decided to collect it.
If your Bank decided to put a list of all bank accounts that have recently been accessed on its home page, would you blame the identity thieves for stealing all your money, or would you blame the bank for broadcasting your information?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Another apple fanboi without a clue as to what technology does behind the scene while he's jerking off to porn on his apple product that his lord and master Steve Jobs forbade him to have.
afaik, your street address is NOT private information. Barring the boonies and any illegal housing projects youre on a map somewhere. I havent seen a dead tree copy of yellowpages in a few years, but in some places residential addresses are listed in the book along with name and landline #
i absolutely liked reading everything that is posted on your blog keep the posts coming. I enjoyed it.
Term Papers
They sure seem to be collecting a lot of data by accident...
My friends at Google swear up and down that every line of code in the Google codebase is reviewed several times before it is signed off and released for any purpose. Some would have caught this; it's obvious from the data what is happening. So, either my friends are liars, or Google is. I trust my friends more.
Am I part of the core demographic for Swedish Fish?
It might be good if some of the smart people commenting here would become familiar with MAC addresses and what they're used for.
You seem to understand that DNS maps domain names to IP addresses - but what maps that IP address to your specific hardware?
Those who say you can change the MAC address to anything you want - maybe they understand that they're assigned in such a way that duplication is rare to impossible. For extra credit, describe what would happen if two devices shared the same MAC address.
google is a front for the nsa
I still struggle to understand the point of view where this is so morbidly bad. It seems as childish as "MOM! Tommy is almost touching me!" on a long car trip. Unless the google street view cars are sitting in front of your house for a few hours collecting packets in the hopes of breaking your *hopefully* encrypted wireless traffic (just to read you G-mail message from aunt Jen or see what kind of demented animal porn you view), I don't see any reason for your panic. They are recording the location of APs for positional data, they have no use for anything else.
I think my favorite motto is Kellogg's "two scoops XOR raisins"
Set your phasers on "funky"!
Never forget this.
With this kind of record or respecting people's privacy I seriously have to question fandroids who rip on Apple. I had high hopes for Google but I don't trust them one bit. "Accident"? I don't think that accidentally happens, it was planned and they just got busted.
Google collected the data off the streets, public roads. Legally, anyone can videotape, and follow anyone this way. I have a dashboard camera and have videos of many drivers and their license plates. Is it legal for me to do so? Yes, actually.
There are also drivers with scanners and CB radios, which can also pick up some GSM signals and that's just fine to have in their car. What I'm saying is, is that picking this stuff up while driving on a public road is legal. If you don't want your wifi signal to be picked up or your cellphone data picked up, then shut them off because just because it's in your home and the fact that it can be picked up off the street means there's nothing you can do about it....
has come to life! Or whatever they called it on southpark. I for one, will not be on google+ as from the beginning it reeked of snooping, and since its designed to be one better than facebook, well... of course its going to do that.
From the makers of The Bomb - they set us up, and Anal Lube.
It's easier to ask forgiveness later then permission first. I believe Google knew what they were doing. I also believe some engineers that worked on the code raised ethical questions that were later squashed. Google is all about data collection.
They recorded either all raw radio wave data or minimally converted everything to digital according to the WiFi protocols. So if someone accessing their bank at the the time Google drove by then Google captured their bank data. If someone used weak pass phrases for their WiFi then the stored data is easily decoded.
I am very libertarian. It doesn't matter if a law says I can't listen into a radio wave, the truth is I can and so can anyone else. It's my fault for not encrypting my data securely. It's my responsibility to know that encryption has it's best practices and to use them as well as to be informed that I am taking a calculated risk in transmitting data wirelessly since nothing is guaranteed.
Radio signals are public.The trick is decoding them. Decoding them should not be illegal since bad guys don't obey the law. To me it's like arresting people for eves dropping at the next table when people can clearly hear them at the other end of the room. If you want privacy, go somewhere private and secure.
If they make a hash of the IP and store the hash instead of the MAC address, would people be pissy about it? You couldn't query a hash DB the same way, you could only query with "I see these mac addresses, where am I" type questions. Problem solved -- right?
I propose that "Do No Google" replace "Do No Evil" as being more encompassing...or more correct.
A series of bad decisions can deplete a company's goodwill reservoir exponentially.
How many PR mistakes does Google need to reach terminal velocity?
The information is BROADCASTED publicly -- if you don't want them to see you then Wifi has the option of hiding the network name; which is clearly indicating that you don't want others seeing you - without doing that you are willfully going naked from view of a PUBLIC SPACE -- so its 100% fair game they snap your photo and there is nothing you can do about it (or should expect to.)
One could argue that merely broadcasting things into the public space is enough; however, due to the nature of the technology this is unavoidable so the hidden network flag should provide a legal means for something that is technically impractical so the hidden network flag is a virtual fence.
Encryption is another matter; but if you broadcast your MAC, or other data unencrypted then its fair game-- the encrypted data is fair game; the issue there is whether somebody has a right to break your encryption-- not whether they are allowed to receive the signals you are projecting directly at them (again, in a public space.) This is like pushing nude photos of yourself onto people going past your house. You could put the photo in an envelope and still do it-- but you are an idiot if you get upset somebody bothers to open that envelope you gave them!
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Hello, of course Google collects WiFi SSID information, how else do you think the WiFi location services work? This isn't just Google, but also Sony, and SkyHook (Apple) to name a few. There's nothing suspicious or illegal about it either. If you don't want it collected, don't broadcast it, sheesh.
Google gathered information being broadcast out in the open. Google isn't bad, broadcasting information is bad. This "news" is FUD trying to build a case against Google.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
Google was basically a peeping tom with peoples information. It was wrong and dumb. But going out and leaving your from door open is too. Why do people lock their doors but leave their networks open?
If Google had come clean about gathering device information other than for access points back when the story originally broke, I'd buy their story. But even when presented with the opportunity to come clean about the scope of their data gathering they elected to hide that information until they were outed.
If it's an accident, you don't try to hide it under the rug, you clean it up properly.
We are the 198 proof..
You all act like if google did something bad. They didn't. They collected data is you and me are streaming out there.
Anyone can do this. ANYONE.
The government, a foreign government, mcdonalds, the homeless dude across the street you give quarters to.
You don't want peeps to know where you are at? Don't use fucking wireless.
If you use wireless, shut the fuck up, and grow a set, and join us in reality.
If you don't want your wifi going outside your house? Either don't use it, or leadline your house.
The reality is, anyone can read the data out there. Accept that, and plan around that. Encrypt your shit, turn off wifi when your not using it, or whatever, but quit throwing a fit because people can get your wifi also.
This is how life is now. Google didn't do anything wrong, at all. If anyone did, it was you for using wireless.
Be seeing you...
The street view cars were connecting to networks to _find out where they were_ ...
why is it surprising that they recorded the location?
The payload information was surprising, yes, but the location???
- imma