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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.'"
This just confirms what people were saying all along. Course will be interesting how die hard google fanbois spin it now.
Last night I stood on the sidewalk outside your parent's home. I used a camcorder with a zoom lens to record what I saw through their windows. You know - just in case there was something "interesting" to see.
I've offered the video to my brother because he might find it useful for his "purposes".
The government investigated me and found that I had obstructed their investigation. They fined me $25,000. ...What's so evil about THAT?!?!?! I'm a good guy! Slashdot said so!
Congratulations - Google is now the equivalent of a techno-peeping tom. And, in case you missed it, that peeping tom wants to usher in a new era of cloud computing where you do most of your computing using Google's closed-source cloud services. Comforting thought.
And yet Slashdot still thinks that Google is their friend and is still railing against the "business practices" of "M$". After all - they dared to put a browser in their OS and *THAT* is evil!
Yes. Again--time and time again, I've preached it. Google is evil. This is only another in a long list of examples illustrating it. Do not trust this company.
And if Matthew Shepard didn't want to get savagely beaten to death by a group of bigots, he should have kept his sexual orientation a secret as well.
Consider what you're saying. It's like condoning someone who breaks and enters into peoples' houses and goes reading through their papers and personal effects, and saying the problem is that they didn't have a secure enough vault in their home.
Perhaps we should encrypt everything, all the time, petrified that someone unintended will snoop on us and find out about it. Perhaps the problem is that we've been too transparent and open about how we live our lives, not that someone else shouldn't be prying into them. However, before adopting Pig Latin as the national language, let's gloss over the Fourth Amendment for a moment.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Hmm. Seems like our right to privacy was pretty important when we founded the U.S.. We didn't want our government invading it, so I doubt we would've wanted anyone else to either. Debate resolved; there's already been a determination on the matter over two hundred years ago, so the matter seems rather dated and redundant now.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability
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.
The Wolfpack Project: BitCoin + Crowdfunding = Political Accountability