t. Privacy violations requires that the victim have reasonable expectation of privacy in the first place.
On the contrary, privacy should be default in a civilised nation. If you want to process personal data then you should have permission. The EU recognises this with the principles behind various member states' data protection laws.
You can argue that there are times permission is given implicitly: for example, if you are in the background of a photograph taken in a public park. "Some data was leaking through the house walls and I can afford equipment to receive it," isn't giving permission. And encryption is irrelevant: the purpose of encryption is to stop the malicious, not to create an arms race with those who want to capture your data.
It is impractical for you to shield your infrared signatures in your day-to-day activities, while turning on encryption on wireless networks is not only easy,
"Might makes right," is not a suitable basis for society or law. Regardless, turning on encryption may be easy if you're a geek, but even understanding the nature of radio waves required millennia of technological development.
How is it that any suitable equipment can receive a radio wave which passes through it? How do you know that a supporting system can probably interpret what's not strongly encrypted? What is encryption? Two decades ago, few would have been able to well answer all these questions; two hundred years ago, no-one could. If you think that the answer to these questions are obvious it's because you lack imagination and can't conceive that the answers could have been different.
Ironic then that you are the one coming across as being so full of himself, claiming some insight into subtle intent that us poor idiots can't divine.
You are asserting that it must be Google's stupidity. I am suggesting that it's better to be humble about your own abilities (e.g. to discern intent) while not assuming others are stupid.
I don't know precisely why Google did it, but I think it is the height of egomania to accuse them of gross negligence.
I think it makes more sense to consider fallibility as an inherently human trait, present no matter how "high up" people may be in a "large organisation".
This isn't an oversight of something subtle or complex corporate machinery repressing glorious logic. This is the professional fencer running around the streets waving his foil around and expressing shock that he injured random passers by.
Well, yes, you can find out some of what people across the world are doing with their own wireless networks, which is not the same as finding out what they're doing on the Internet while they use Google services or services supported by Google.
The software used here was configurable as to whether it logs the data frame (defaulting to capture).
So the kid just out of vocational college might forget to review a configuration file when running some software on his home laptop. The biggest data miner in the world with a challenging barrier to employment and multiple code reviews will not make this sort of oversight.
Uncaught bugs happen during software development and deployment all the time
One single review of the logged data would have caught this. Since it would be absurd to assume that Google didn't perform any reviews of logged data (even summary information on amount logged) during the exercise, we must assume that it was intentional.
Give it up. Even the smallest accountant would know to audit his processes and his records when performing any data collection. The difference between that accountant and Google is that we know Google has and employs the resources to continuously and carefully analyse personal data.
"On the toilet" is a British English version of "in the bathroom". I could have offered "in the loo", "on the bog", "dropping the kids off at the station", etc. In the 21st century, that means inside your house. And if Google can collect something leaking from your house around 100mm then I can record leaks of leaks between 1 and 350um.
But I'm glad we agree that any waves not detectable by human ears/eyes should not be recorded without permission.
Google have provided fuller explanations [blogspot.com] of what happened.
Is that an independent audit by someone with a recognised reputation, or the accused party giving its side of the story and your requiring us to beg the question?
And that's a strawman. We're discussing whether (radio, sound) waves which can be picked up with suitably advanced tech should be recorded, not whether the behaviour of my eyes can be replicated.
For example, am I allowed to sit outside your house with an infrared camera and sensitive microphone to capture and broadcast your daughter masturbating in the shower?
I'm sorry, what? If I was trying to record SSIDs, I'd read the packet containing the SSID then extract and log the SSID. If I was trying to record the first X+64 bytes then I'd record the first X+64 bytes.
And if I wasn't Google and couldn't afford to employ a programmer with any training or experience whatever, who for whatever reason confused himself to the point that "log the SSID" is interpreted as "log the first n bytes of the packet", it'd've been caught in code review.
And if it wasn't caught in code review, it'd've been caught after the first careful manual review of data following the first test run.
And if it wasn't caught then, it'd've been caught at the first review of real data collection.
You have to go out of your way in both ignoring spec and ignoring any sort of proper coding or testing practice in order for this to have happened.
Hi, can you confirm that you reported your mistake to your employers and that your employers reported their mistake to anyone affected by your action?
I'm sure you'll come round with "but all the logs and their backups and so on were wiped!" - but since you made the mistake of logging the information in the first place, how can I trust that you didn't also make a mistake when wiping?
Are you paying attention? I as much as stated that they might not have done it to gather private data but to stimulate debate on privacy issues.
Accidentally capturing WLAN traffic while charting APs sounds like a very reasonable explanation. Kismet in default settings anyone?
Because of your ego, you're assuming Google project leaders are not much brighter than you. I tend to assume that all people high up in large organisations (government or otherwise) are brighter than me: if it's not obvious why they've done something, it's because I'm not smart enough to have figured out why yet. Geeks tend to be so full of themselves that they assume stupidity rather than subtle intent for any human action they can't explain, but I pride myself in having grown out of the "ppl r just dumb (altho im quite smart)" mindset.
To assert that so much data is useless and must have been recorded accidentally is to reach cult-like levels of apology when referring to the biggest data miner in history.
Even if you don't see any value today in information on how people use wireless networks (you know, for targeted ad systems and all that jazz), the data might be useful at a later date, so why not gather it?
Anyone who believes Google did this by accident is a fucking idiot. Of course, their motivation may not have been to actually use this data, but to test government response to data collection on such a grand scale and open the dialogue for reduced privacy rights.
Let us ignore what Google says and ignore what involved governments say, instead watching what each group is actually doing in terms of respecting privacy and other privileges to data.
Also, to occupatio the inevitable: no, you don't have a right to record it on a grand scale just because you can eavesdrop it. Not until I can use my infrared camera and highly sensitive microphone to upload video of your daughter on the toilet.
Agreed. The sense of entitlement to ownership of ideas and their expressions, especially when most of the work going into every example of either is the result of millennia of cultural and technological development, is laughable.
"It's mine I thought of it first!" is intellectually dishonest and pathetic beyond kindergarten.
But how much money did he make and move offshore? Maybe 30 months is trivial for him. Maybe 30 months is unusually large and it's normally fair to bet on a much lighter sentence.
I think a mistranslation of Descartes' "I am thinking therefore I am" as "I think therefore I am" holds substantial blame whenever this wheel is reinvented. He wasn't saying that he exists because he can think but that he only knows he exists at the very moment he is thinking.
You're right that things get very difficult when you stop assuming your memory is reliable, but what's interesting is the extent to which scientists take it on faith as part of a method many insist is the antithesis of faith. Contrast religious types who take other leaps of faith while being more willing to believe that our senses are unreliable, e.g. subject to trickery by some god or demon.
Since you didn't learn how to form your thoughts into words and even turn those words into symbols at the very moment you expressed those thoughts in this forum
How do you know? You're relying on your memory to know this.
And since others were capable of reading the outcome of your thoughts,
Are you sure that's what others did? Why do you trust your memory to be correct?
Religious types have faith in the existence of a deity; scientists have faith in the existence of their own reasonably reliable memory and senses. A religious man cannot prove the existence of his deity with in his model, and a scientist cannot prove the existence of reliable memory/senses within his model. It's annoying, but you have to deal with it.
If I can predict an outcome relying on nothing but my memory (If i put my hand in a fire, it will burn) - I just proved that my memory reflects a high degree of truth.
Nope. After the outcome, you're trusting that you correctly recall your prediction before the outcome.
Perhaps you have spent too much time around a very recent sort of religious type. Abrahamic religions are fairly clear that God is a mystery and that he reveals his "how" through science. As for "why" the laws of science are as they are, that is not the realm of science. Yet it is the hubris to believe otherwise which plagues mediocre and armchair scientists today.
Why is the reasonable correctness of memory the best possibility? Do not use an argument which in any way assumes the reasonable correctness of memory.
You only think that science explains the "delusion" (as you put it) correctly because you have faith in your memory's recollection of previous observations and results. It could be that you saw nothing or that you saw something entirely different to what you now recall seeing. You have faith that this possibility is not so.
Which is why scientists need to show some more humility. There is nothing wrong with promoting the practice of science as long as one accepts that the scientist makes faith-based assumptions and does not begin to argue that it is some way in opposition to all religious belief.
Most of humanity's great scientists have not had a problem with the idea that God should reveal himself through science and that God remains a mystery (i.e. science could continue asking "why?" to everything forever, but there is no evidence that humans have infinite amount of time to answer all questions). The stumbling block is mostly apparent in a gaggle of laymen in recent years who have politicised and polarised science and religion.
How do you know that you have referred to them, perhaps more than once? Because you remember having done so, and you have faith in your memory. You assert that procedures are repeatable because you recall either having done them or having read about their being done before, and you trust that recollection because you have faith in your memory.
You need to specifically formulate an argument for the validity of scientific method which does not involve faith in human memory.
How do you know that they are several men's memories? How do you know that the records exist? Because you remember it to be so, and you have faith in your memory.
A fact is not the same as your perception of that fact. All humans have is perceptions of facts; the process between perception and assertion is based on faith.
Slashdot Mirror
t. Privacy violations requires that the victim have reasonable expectation of privacy in the first place.
On the contrary, privacy should be default in a civilised nation. If you want to process personal data then you should have permission. The EU recognises this with the principles behind various member states' data protection laws.
You can argue that there are times permission is given implicitly: for example, if you are in the background of a photograph taken in a public park. "Some data was leaking through the house walls and I can afford equipment to receive it," isn't giving permission. And encryption is irrelevant: the purpose of encryption is to stop the malicious, not to create an arms race with those who want to capture your data.
It is impractical for you to shield your infrared signatures in your day-to-day activities, while turning on encryption on wireless networks is not only easy,
"Might makes right," is not a suitable basis for society or law. Regardless, turning on encryption may be easy if you're a geek, but even understanding the nature of radio waves required millennia of technological development.
How is it that any suitable equipment can receive a radio wave which passes through it? How do you know that a supporting system can probably interpret what's not strongly encrypted? What is encryption? Two decades ago, few would have been able to well answer all these questions; two hundred years ago, no-one could. If you think that the answer to these questions are obvious it's because you lack imagination and can't conceive that the answers could have been different.
Ironic then that you are the one coming across as being so full of himself, claiming some insight into subtle intent that us poor idiots can't divine.
You are asserting that it must be Google's stupidity. I am suggesting that it's better to be humble about your own abilities (e.g. to discern intent) while not assuming others are stupid.
I don't know precisely why Google did it, but I think it is the height of egomania to accuse them of gross negligence.
I think it makes more sense to consider fallibility as an inherently human trait, present no matter how "high up" people may be in a "large organisation".
This isn't an oversight of something subtle or complex corporate machinery repressing glorious logic. This is the professional fencer running around the streets waving his foil around and expressing shock that he injured random passers by.
Well, yes, you can find out some of what people across the world are doing with their own wireless networks, which is not the same as finding out what they're doing on the Internet while they use Google services or services supported by Google.
The software used here was configurable as to whether it logs the data frame (defaulting to capture).
So the kid just out of vocational college might forget to review a configuration file when running some software on his home laptop. The biggest data miner in the world with a challenging barrier to employment and multiple code reviews will not make this sort of oversight.
Uncaught bugs happen during software development and deployment all the time
One single review of the logged data would have caught this. Since it would be absurd to assume that Google didn't perform any reviews of logged data (even summary information on amount logged) during the exercise, we must assume that it was intentional.
Give it up. Even the smallest accountant would know to audit his processes and his records when performing any data collection. The difference between that accountant and Google is that we know Google has and employs the resources to continuously and carefully analyse personal data.
"On the toilet" is a British English version of "in the bathroom". I could have offered "in the loo", "on the bog", "dropping the kids off at the station", etc. In the 21st century, that means inside your house. And if Google can collect something leaking from your house around 100mm then I can record leaks of leaks between 1 and 350um.
But I'm glad we agree that any waves not detectable by human ears/eyes should not be recorded without permission.
Google have provided fuller explanations [blogspot.com] of what happened.
Is that an independent audit by someone with a recognised reputation, or the accused party giving its side of the story and your requiring us to beg the question?
And that's a strawman. We're discussing whether (radio, sound) waves which can be picked up with suitably advanced tech should be recorded, not whether the behaviour of my eyes can be replicated.
For example, am I allowed to sit outside your house with an infrared camera and sensitive microphone to capture and broadcast your daughter masturbating in the shower?
I'm sorry, what? If I was trying to record SSIDs, I'd read the packet containing the SSID then extract and log the SSID. If I was trying to record the first X+64 bytes then I'd record the first X+64 bytes.
And if I wasn't Google and couldn't afford to employ a programmer with any training or experience whatever, who for whatever reason confused himself to the point that "log the SSID" is interpreted as "log the first n bytes of the packet", it'd've been caught in code review.
And if it wasn't caught in code review, it'd've been caught after the first careful manual review of data following the first test run.
And if it wasn't caught then, it'd've been caught at the first review of real data collection.
You have to go out of your way in both ignoring spec and ignoring any sort of proper coding or testing practice in order for this to have happened.
Hi, can you confirm that you reported your mistake to your employers and that your employers reported their mistake to anyone affected by your action?
I'm sure you'll come round with "but all the logs and their backups and so on were wiped!" - but since you made the mistake of logging the information in the first place, how can I trust that you didn't also make a mistake when wiping?
Are you paying attention? I as much as stated that they might not have done it to gather private data but to stimulate debate on privacy issues.
Accidentally capturing WLAN traffic while charting APs sounds like a very reasonable explanation. Kismet in default settings anyone?
Because of your ego, you're assuming Google project leaders are not much brighter than you. I tend to assume that all people high up in large organisations (government or otherwise) are brighter than me: if it's not obvious why they've done something, it's because I'm not smart enough to have figured out why yet. Geeks tend to be so full of themselves that they assume stupidity rather than subtle intent for any human action they can't explain, but I pride myself in having grown out of the "ppl r just dumb (altho im quite smart)" mindset.
To assert that so much data is useless and must have been recorded accidentally is to reach cult-like levels of apology when referring to the biggest data miner in history.
Even if you don't see any value today in information on how people use wireless networks (you know, for targeted ad systems and all that jazz), the data might be useful at a later date, so why not gather it?
Anyone who believes Google did this by accident is a fucking idiot. Of course, their motivation may not have been to actually use this data, but to test government response to data collection on such a grand scale and open the dialogue for reduced privacy rights.
Let us ignore what Google says and ignore what involved governments say, instead watching what each group is actually doing in terms of respecting privacy and other privileges to data.
Also, to occupatio the inevitable: no, you don't have a right to record it on a grand scale just because you can eavesdrop it. Not until I can use my infrared camera and highly sensitive microphone to upload video of your daughter on the toilet.
If there's anything Apple have taught us, it's that an awful lot of people don't do any real work on their computers.
For those who do, real computers with real I/O devices will remain.
And nothing of value was gained.
Agreed. The sense of entitlement to ownership of ideas and their expressions, especially when most of the work going into every example of either is the result of millennia of cultural and technological development, is laughable.
"It's mine I thought of it first!" is intellectually dishonest and pathetic beyond kindergarten.
But how much money did he make and move offshore? Maybe 30 months is trivial for him. Maybe 30 months is unusually large and it's normally fair to bet on a much lighter sentence.
If you were getting 100% in essays then you went to an awful school. Your sentence structure stinks and your second paragraph is unwieldly.
I think a mistranslation of Descartes' "I am thinking therefore I am" as "I think therefore I am" holds substantial blame whenever this wheel is reinvented. He wasn't saying that he exists because he can think but that he only knows he exists at the very moment he is thinking.
You're right that things get very difficult when you stop assuming your memory is reliable, but what's interesting is the extent to which scientists take it on faith as part of a method many insist is the antithesis of faith. Contrast religious types who take other leaps of faith while being more willing to believe that our senses are unreliable, e.g. subject to trickery by some god or demon.
Since you didn't learn how to form your thoughts into words and even turn those words into symbols at the very moment you expressed those thoughts in this forum
How do you know? You're relying on your memory to know this.
And since others were capable of reading the outcome of your thoughts,
Are you sure that's what others did? Why do you trust your memory to be correct?
Religious types have faith in the existence of a deity; scientists have faith in the existence of their own reasonably reliable memory and senses. A religious man cannot prove the existence of his deity with in his model, and a scientist cannot prove the existence of reliable memory/senses within his model. It's annoying, but you have to deal with it.
If I can predict an outcome relying on nothing but my memory (If i put my hand in a fire, it will burn) - I just proved that my memory reflects a high degree of truth.
Nope. After the outcome, you're trusting that you correctly recall your prediction before the outcome.
Perhaps you have spent too much time around a very recent sort of religious type. Abrahamic religions are fairly clear that God is a mystery and that he reveals his "how" through science. As for "why" the laws of science are as they are, that is not the realm of science. Yet it is the hubris to believe otherwise which plagues mediocre and armchair scientists today.
Why is the reasonable correctness of memory the best possibility? Do not use an argument which in any way assumes the reasonable correctness of memory.
You only think that science explains the "delusion" (as you put it) correctly because you have faith in your memory's recollection of previous observations and results. It could be that you saw nothing or that you saw something entirely different to what you now recall seeing. You have faith that this possibility is not so.
Which is why scientists need to show some more humility. There is nothing wrong with promoting the practice of science as long as one accepts that the scientist makes faith-based assumptions and does not begin to argue that it is some way in opposition to all religious belief.
Most of humanity's great scientists have not had a problem with the idea that God should reveal himself through science and that God remains a mystery (i.e. science could continue asking "why?" to everything forever, but there is no evidence that humans have infinite amount of time to answer all questions). The stumbling block is mostly apparent in a gaggle of laymen in recent years who have politicised and polarised science and religion.
How do you know that you have referred to them, perhaps more than once? Because you remember having done so, and you have faith in your memory. You assert that procedures are repeatable because you recall either having done them or having read about their being done before, and you trust that recollection because you have faith in your memory.
You need to specifically formulate an argument for the validity of scientific method which does not involve faith in human memory.
How do you know that they are several men's memories? How do you know that the records exist? Because you remember it to be so, and you have faith in your memory.
A fact is not the same as your perception of that fact. All humans have is perceptions of facts; the process between perception and assertion is based on faith.