Report Finds Google Supervisors Knew About Wi-Fi Data Harvesting

bonch writes "According to the FCC report, Google's collection of Street View data was not the unauthorized act of a rogue engineer, as Google had portrayed it, but an authorized program known to supervisors and at least seven other engineers. The original proposal contradicts Google's claim that there was no intent to gather payload data: 'We are logging user traffic along with sufficient data to precisely triangulate their position at a given time, along with information about what they were doing.'"

Comments

Re:There are rules, even unspoken

[sixtyeight]

The wifi data was half-in, half-out of their private homes

No, it was out. The Google car never entered their property, and yet was able to capture that information in its entirety. It was wholly out of their home.

No, it was half-in, half-out. By that I mean it was being used in their homes, and "leaked" out because that's what airwaves do. Which isn't typically a big deal, since one hardly expects people to be sitting outside trying to pick it up. That's why this story is such a big deal; this time, someone was. I realize that it [purportedly] was unintentional, which is the only exonerating factor.

You argue that no, the exonerating factor was that Google should have been allowed to do this intentionally if it so desired. That the onus is on the private citizens to encrypt everything just in case someone is out there actively trying to sniff their data. Which is a distinct difference in mentality.

It was meant to be used by them, in their homes

They might have intended for it to only be in use in their home, but they never took the simple necessary technological measure to make it so (encrypting it) which is not a difficult thing to do with a home-use wi-fi router, even for a novice. It just requires them to read the manual.

There's nothing technologically complicated about using a handgun either, and using one could certainly save you from a violent mugging. Whenever you leave your home, there is also a slight chance that it will rain no matter what the weather report says. You might get slammed by a car as you cross the street, therefore you should never leave the house without a pair of clean underwear on, in case you have an unanticipated ambulance ride to the hospital to worry about. And you might run into some tourists from Spain who don't speak English while you're out. Therefore, you should never leave the house without a loaded handgun, a large umbrella, a pair of clean underwear on, and a Spanish-to-English translation dictionary. Otherwise, it's your own damn fault.

and technology had to be specifically modified and sent out in order to intercept it

No, no it didn't. One of the details in this case is that Google basically just used an off-the-shelf piece of software to dump all publicly available information. They caught that data because they didn't customize it.

They were using Kismet, so you're technically correct.

My point, however, remains. Kismet does not come standard, you have to purposely install it - usually to sniff another person's otherwise-private network traffic. If Google's sniffing had been deliberate, my point is that they would have been in the wrong for so doing. You seem to be adopting the position that no, that's perfectly alright, the citizenry had no reasonable expectation of a right to privacy there. That packet sniffing, as deliberate as it usually has to be, is just as easy to do and probably as someone glancing in your window. And that is wrong.

If Google itself had condoned it, there would be little difference between that and seeking to obtain Zero-Day exploits to commercial systems - with the exception that these are private individuals, not mere corporations.

And the fact that there was no security to actually exploit.

I think you missed my point there. I know this is Slashdot, but when I mentioned Zero-Days I was getting at legal exploits, not literal technological ones. Stuff without a lot of case precedent about it yet, such as intercepted wifi data, which Google - if they had done it deliberately, and happily this appears not to be the case - would have been able to take advantage of. In other words, using the fact that technology innovates faster than case precedent is established, to take advantage of people.